Battle Flag

  Unless, that is, the Confederacy risked everything on a daring and desperate chance. Not a maneuver from the rule book, but something from the devil's box of tricks instead. Lee sensed the idea like a temptation. He suddenly saw how he could tip John Pope off balance and then savage him, and the idea burgeoned in his mind even as the well-schooled and conventional part of his training attempted to reject the notion as too risky. But another part of Lee was tantalized by the beauty and symmetry of the outrageous idea. It was a maneuver that would humiliate John Pope and drive the Yankees clean out of Virginia, and as Lee considered the rewards and risks of his maneuver, he felt the excitement of a gambler staking everything on a single run of cards. The thing could be done! Yet his face betrayed no hint of that excitement as he climbed into his saddle and settled his boots into his stirrups. "My compliments to General Jackson," he said calmly, pushing his telescope back into its case and gathering Traveller's reins into his hands, "and I would be much obliged if he would call on me at his earliest convenience."

  And then, Lee thought, he would let Old Mad Jack off his leash.

  And God help John Pope then.

  It was not convenient for Major General Thomas Jackson to call on General Robert Lee. It would be convenient soon, but not yet, for General Jackson had two urgent duties to perform. They were not pleasant duties—indeed, lesser men might have shrunk from them altogether—but Thomas Jackson considered them simple responsibilities, and so he performed them with his customary dogged diligence.

  Men had to be shot. Southern men. Except to the General they were not men, but curs and trash who had deserted their duties and thus placed themselves beneath contempt. Their commanding officers had pleaded for the condemned men's lives, but Jackson had answered that men who desert their comrades deserve to be shot and officers who pleaded for such men deserved to be hung, and after that curt response there had been no more pleas for clemency. Now, beneath a clearing sky and on a meadow still damp from the previous day's rains, Jackson had assembled his whole corps. Three divisions of soldiers, twenty-four thousand men, were paraded in rank after shabby gray rank to form three sides of an open square. The morning was hot and the air stifling.

  Drums beat slow as a band played a ragged funeral dirge. The band was paraded a few paces behind Jackson, who sat on his small, rawboned horse and stared morosely at three wooden stakes that had been plunged into the dirt beside three rough-sawn pine coffins and three freshly dug graves. Behind him his staff sat silent in their saddles, some of them more nervous of this morning's killings than they had ever been of battle. Captain Hudson, Lee's aide, who was waiting to escort General Jackson back to meet the army's commander in Gordonsville, watched the gaunt, famous figure and wondered if ever, in all the history of warfare, any commander had appeared so unprepossessing. The General's beard was unkempt, and his clothes looked in worse condition than any of his soldiers' uniforms. He had an old blue coat that was vaguely military in cut but threadbare and faded, while for a hat Jackson favored a shabby cadet's cap with a creased brim that was pulled low over his eyes. His horse was a big-headed, knock-kneed, clumsy beast with a patchy chestnut pelt, while the General's enormous boots were thrust into rusted stirrups that hung from mended leather straps. The most impressive military aspect of the General, apart from his reputation, was his rigid pose, for he sat his horse straight-backed and with his head held high, but then, as if to spoil that martial stance, he slowly and inexplicably raised his left hand until it was poised higher than his scruffy, creased cap. He then held the hand motionless, as though he was beseeching the Almighty for blessing.

  The three doomed men were marched onto the field, each man escorted by his own company. The General had insisted that the criminals must be shot by their own comrades, for those comrades were the men most immediately betrayed by each deserter. An army chaplain waited for the condemned men, who, on reaching the stakes, were ordered onto their knees. The chaplain stepped forward and began to pray.

  A small wind stirred the sullen air. To the west a sifting plume of smoke showed where the Yankee raiders had struck in the night, and Jackson, reminded of that impudent raid, looked toward the Faulconer Brigade to see the regiment that paraded without its colors. They had lost their colors, just as they had lost most of their officers, and Jackson, brooding on the Yankee coup, felt a spasm of anger.

  The prayer seemed unending. The chaplain's eyes were screwed tight shut, and his hands clenched hard about a battered Bible as he commended the three sinners' souls to the God they were about to meet. The chaplain reminded God of the two thieves who had shared His Son's death on Calvary and implored the Almighty to look as charitably upon these three sinners as Christ had looked upon the repentant thief. One of the three men was unable to check his tears. He was a beardless youth who had deserted because his sixteen-year-old wife had run away with his uncle, and now he was to die in a green field because he had loved her so much. He looked up at his Captain and tried to make a last-minute plea, but the chaplain simply raised his voice- so that the useless request could not be heard. The other two men showed no emotion, not even when the band finished its funereal music and went suddenly silent after a last uneven flurry on the drums.

  The chaplain also finished. He stumbled as he stepped backward from the victims. A staff officer took the chap­lain's place and in a loud, slow voice that almost carried to the rearmost ranks of the twenty-four thousand witnesses, read aloud the charges against the three men and the ver­dicts of their courts-martial. The bleak sentences finished, he stepped back and looked at the three company officers. "Carry on."

  "No, for the love of God, no! Please, no!" The young man tried to resist, but two of his comrades dragged him to the stake and there pinioned him with rope. The three men wore shirts, pants, and ragged boots. A sergeant blindfolded the weeping youth and told him to stop his noise and die like a man. The other two deserters refused their blindfolds. "Ready!" the staff officer shouted, and over a hundred rifles were raised to the firing position. Some men aimed wide, some blatantly had their rifles uncocked, but most of the men obeyed the order.

  "Aim!" the staff officer called, and two nervous men pulled their triggers instead. Both bullets flew wide.

  "Wait for it!" a sergeant snarled. A company officer had his eyes closed, and his lips were moving in silent prayer as he waited for the order to fire. One of the doomed men spat onto the grass. To Lee's aide, who had not expected to witness death this morning, it seemed as though three whole divi­sions of troops were holding their collective breath, while Jackson, his left hand held high, seemed carved from stone.

  "No, please! No!" the young man called. His blindfolded head was thrashing from side to side. "Nancy!" he shouted desperately, "my Nancy!"

  The staff officer took a deep breath. "Fire!" The smoke jetted suddenly. The volley's huge sound rolled across the fields to explode birds from far-off trees.

  The three men jerked in sudden spasms as their shirts erupted with blood. The companies' commanding officers walked to the three stakes with their revolvers drawn, but only one of the men was still alive. The man's breath bubbled in the wreckage of his ribs, and his bearded head twitched. His company officer cocked his revolver, held his breath, and tried to stop his hand shaking. For a second or two it looked as though he would be unable to give the coup de grace; then he managed to pull the trigger, and the living man's head was shattered by the bullet. The Captain turned away and vomited into the open grave as the band jerked into the tune of "Old Dan Tucker." Lee's aide let out a long slow breath.

  "Put 'em in their boxes!" a sergeant called, and men ran forward to cut the dead men away from their stakes and lift them into the open-topped coffins, which were then ramped up on the red earth mounds so that a passer-by could see the corpses clearly. "Take the wrap off the young lad," the sergeant ordered and waited as the cuckolded youth's blind­fold was removed.

  Then, one by one the regiments were marched past the dead. Men from Virginia and
Georgia, from the Carolinas and Tennessee, from Alabama and Louisiana, were all shown the three corpses, and after the infantry came the artillery and the engineers, all made to look into the eyes of the fly-infested dead, so that they would understand what fate awaited a deserter. General Jackson had been the first man to inspect the three corpses, and he had stared intently into the faces as though trying to understand the impulse that could drive a man to the unforgivable sin of desertion. As a Christian the General had to believe that such sinners could be redeemed, but as a soldier he could not imagine any of the three men knowing a moment's peace throughout eternity, and his face showed nothing but disgust as he twitched his horse's reins and headed toward the farm that served as his headquarters.

  It was there, in a parlor that was hung with an ancient portrait of President George Washington and a newer one of President Jefferson Davis, that the General undertook his second unpleasant duty of the day. He stood with his ramrod-straight back to the portrait of Washington and, flanked by three senior staff officers, summoned General Washington Faulconer into his presence.

  The parlor was a small room made even smaller by a map table that almost filled the space between its lime-washed walls. Washington Faulconer entered the room to find him­self cribbed in a narrow space and faced by four men behind the map table, all standing and all looking uncomfortably like judges. He had half expected to be seated opposite the General, but instead this meeting was evidently to be con­ducted formally, and Washington Faulconer felt even more uncomfortable at that daunting prospect. He was wearing a borrowed sword and a borrowed jacket that was at least one size too big for him. Sweat was trickling into his golden beard. The small parlor stank of unwashed bodies and dirty clothes. "General," Faulconer said in cautious greeting as he stood opposite his commanding general.

  Jackson said nothing at first but just stared at the fair-haired Faulconer. The General's face showed the exact same expression as when he had stared down at the three slack-jawed, chest-shattered deserters in their cheap pine coffins, and Faulconer, unable to meet the intensity of that blue-eyed gaze, looked guiltily away. "I gave orders," Jackson spoke at last in his clipped, high voice, "that all the crossings of the Rapidan were to be guarded."

  "I—" Faulconer began, but was instantly silenced.

  "Quiet!" Even Jackson's three staff officers felt a frisson of terror at the intensity of that command, while Washington Faulconer visibly shook. "I gave orders," Jackson began again, "that all the crossings of the Rapidan were to be guarded. Men of your brigade, General, discovered an unmapped ford and were intelligent enough to obey my orders. While you"—and here the General paused just long enough for a rictus to shiver his body—"countermanded them."

  "I—" Faulconer began, and this time was stopped not by a word of command but simply by the look in the General's blue eyes.

  "The damage?" Jackson turned abruptly to one of his most trusted aides, Major Hotchkiss, a scholarly and pains­taking man who had been deputed to discover the truth about the night's incursion. Hotchkiss had arrived at the remnants of the Faulconer Brigade's headquarters at dawn and had spent the next two hours questioning survivors, and now, in a dry, neutral voice, he offered his horrid list.

  "Fourteen dead, sir," Hotchkiss said, "and twenty-four seriously hurt. Those are soldiers, but there were at least six civilians killed, and three of those, maybe more, were women. We won't know for sure till the tavern ruins are cool enough to be searched." Hotchkiss's news was all the more damning for being announced in a placid voice. Major Hinton was among the dead, while Captain Murphy was wounded so grievously that no one was certain that his name would not soon be added to the grim tally.

  "And among the dead is Captain Talliser, my aide," Jackson added in a dangerous voice.

  No one responded.

  "Captain Talliser was the son of a good friend," Jackson delivered his aide's obituary, "and was himself a loyal servant of Christ. He deserved better than to be mauled to death by night raiders."

  In the back of the house a man's voice suddenly began singing "How sweet the name of Jesus sounds." Pots clat­tered in that distant room; then the hymn was interrupted by laughter. The sound of the pots woke a tabby cat that had been sleeping on the parlor's windowsill. The cat arched its back, yawned, delicately stretched out each front paw, then began to wash its face. Major Hotchkiss looked back to his list. "Of material losses, sir," he said, "my preliminary esti­mate is that sixteen thousand rifle cartridges were lost in the fire, plus eighty-six charges of powder and thirty-eight rounds of common shell. Two limbers, four caissons, and three wagons were burned out and at least six horses taken." Hotchkiss folded the list, then raised scornful eyes to Washington Faulconer. "Two battle flags were also carried away by the enemy."

  Another pained silence ensued. It seemed to stretch for­ever before, at last, Jackson spoke again. "And how did the raiders cross the river?"

  "At a place called Dead Mary's Ford," Hotchkiss answered, "which had been properly guarded until the previous night. The raiders were intercepted during their withdrawal and a prisoner taken. The raiders also lost one horse." Hotchkiss, a dry, stern man who had once taught school, added the fact of the horse's death in a sarcastic voice. Faulconer colored.

  "And it was by your orders, General," Jackson said, ignor­ing Hotchkiss's sarcasm, "that the ford was uncovered."

  This time Faulconer tried no defense. He looked up briefly, but he still could not meet Jackson's gaze, and so he looked down again. He wanted to say that he had only been trying to instill discipline into his Brigade and that he had lost his precious saber in the night and, worst of all, that the whole humiliation had been at the hands of his own son. And not just one humiliation, for his servant Nelson had returned that same morning with the dreadful tale of Adam's raid on Seven Springs, which meant that Adam had attacked both his mother and his father, and the realization of those two awful betrayals filled Faulconer's eyes with tears.

  "You must have something to say, Faulconer," Jackson said.

  Faulconer cleared his throat. "Accidents happen," he suggested feebly. "The ford," he shrugged, "it wasn't on the map, sir, merely a shallow spot. Lack of rain, really." He knew he was stammering like a fool and tried to pull himself together. Goddamn it! Was he not one of Virginia's wealthi­est men? A landowner who could buy this Tom Fool general a million times over? And Faulconer tried to remember all the risible stories about Jackson: how the General taught in a Negro Sunday school and how he gave a tenth of his income to the church and how he took a cold bath at six o'clock every morning, summer and winter alike, and how he held his left hand in the air so the blood would not col­lect and turn an old wound rancid, but somehow the catalog of Jackson's eccentricities and imbecilities did not make Faulconer feel any more confident. "I deemed that the ford was not important," he managed to say.

  "And what did you deem my orders to be?"

  Faulconer frowned, not understanding the question.

  "I ordered all fords, regardless of their importance, to be guarded," Jackson said. "You thought I was amusing myself by delivering such a command?"

  Faulconer, defeated, could only shrug.

  Jackson paused a second, then delivered his verdict. "You are dismissed from your command, General." Jackson's voice was harsher than ever, prompted not just by Faulconer's dereliction of duty but also by the tears he saw in Faulconer's eyes. General Jackson did not mind tears in their proper place: at a deathbed, say, or in contemplation of Christ's miraculous atonement, but not here where men spoke of duty. "You will leave this army forthwith," Jackson con­tinued, "and report to the War Department in Richmond for further orders. If there are any further orders for you, which it is my fervent hope there are not. Dismissed!"

  Faulconer looked up. He blinked back his tears. For a second it seemed he might try and protest the hard sentence, but then he turned without any acknowledgment and left the room.

  Jackson waited for the door to close. "Political generals,"
he said bitterly, "are as fit for soldiering as lapdogs for hunt­ing." He reached for Major Hotchkiss's list and read its depressing statistics without showing any sign of regret or surprise. "Make the arrangements for Faulconer's replace­ment," he said as he handed the paper back to the staff officer. Then he picked up his shabby hat in readiness for his visit to Lee's headquarters. A final thought struck him as he reached the door and he paused there, frowning. "The enemy did well," Jackson said, apparently to himself, "so we shall just have to do better."

  It was midday before the ruins of McComb's Tavern were cool enough to let a work party retrieve the bodies from the heart of the wreckage, and even then the salvage work had to be done by men wearing protective strips of water-soaked sacking around their boots and hands. The corpses had been shrunk by the fierce heat into black, brittle manikins that smelt disturbingly of roasted pork. Starbuck supervised the work. He was still officially under arrest, but no one else seemed willing to take charge of the salvage, and so, while the Brigade marched off to witness the executions and while General Washington Faulconer waited at General Jackson's headquarters, Starbuck took a dozen men from his own company and set them to work.

  "So what's happening?" Truslow had asked Starbuck at dawn when the early light revealed the blackened and smoking wreckage.

  "Don't know."

  "Are you under arrest?"

  "Don't know."

  "Who's commanding the Legion?"

  "Medlicott," Starbuck said. Faulconer had made the appointment during the night.

  "Dan Medlicott!" Truslow said disgustedly. "Why in hell's name appoint him?"

  Starbuck did not answer. He felt slighted by the appoint­ment, for he had been a captain long before Daniel Medlicott had bribed his way to the rank in the spring elec­tion, but Starbuck also understood that Washington Faulconer would never have appointed him to command the Legion. "I've got a job for you," Starbuck told Truslow instead. "The prisoner's being unhelpful." The man they had captured was called Sparrow and came from Virginia's Pendleton County, one of the fractious western counties that had declared themselves to be a new state loyal to the Union.