Battle Flag

  "Give him our thanks," Swynyard said. "And if I might give some advice, gentlemen," the aide said, "you should have your men cook as many rations as they possess and have them ready for a very early march in the morning." He smiled and walked back into the house.

  "My God," Swynyard said faintly, "a brigade." The Colonel seemed moved nearer to tears than to exultation. He was silent for a few seconds, and Starbuck guessed he was praying; then Swynyard led the way to where their horses were picketed. "I wasn't altogether honest with you earlier," the Colonel said as he untied his horse. "I knew Hotchkiss was sounding me out about the Legion's new commanding officer, but I dared not raise your hopes. Or mine, I confess." Starbuck clumsily mounted the borrowed horse. "Medlicott won't be happy."

  "The object of this war," Colonel Swynyard said tartly, "is to correct Abraham Lincoln's political misconceptions, not to make Captain Medlicott happy." He waited until Starbuck had settled himself in the saddle. "I thought you were going to upset Jackson."

  Starbuck grinned. "Old Jack can hardly be expected to approve of womanizing, can he?"

  Swynyard looked up at the sky. The last clouds had gone, and there was a splendor of stars arching over their heads. "I suppose I shouldn't pass on rumor," the Colonel said, "but there are stories that Old Jack had a love child once. Long ago. The stories are probably untrue, but who knows? Maybe you have to know sin before you can hate it. Maybe the best of Christians are made from the worst of sinners?"

  "So there's hope for me yet?" Starbuck asked teasingly.

  "Only if you win battles, Starbuck, only if you win battles." The Colonel looked at the younger man. "The Legion won't be an easy job, Starbuck."

  "No, sir, but I'm the best man for it." Starbuck smiled at the Colonel. "I'm an arrogant son of a bitch, but by God I can fight." And now he had a whole regiment to fight for him, and he could not wait to start.

  General Thomas Jackson put the interview with Swynyard and Starbuck out of his mind the very second that they left the room, concentrating instead on the maps that Major Hotchkiss had painstakingly drawn for him. Those hand­made maps, spread edge to edge on the trestle table where their corners were weighted down by candlesticks, showed the country north of the Rappahannock, the country where Robert Lee's impudent and daring idea would be put to the test. It was an idea that Jackson liked because it was chal­lenging, and because it held immense possibilities.

  Which meant it also held enormous risks.

  The enemy was digging in beyond the steep northern bank of the Rappahannock, inviting the rebels to throw away their lives in vain attacks across the deep river. The enemy doubtless planned to stay behind the river while more and more of McClellan's regiments joined their ranks until, at last, their numbers were overpowering and they felt confident of sweeping Lee's ragged army clean out of history.

  So Lee, in response, was proposing to break one of the fundamental rules of war. Lee was planning to split his already outnumbered army into two smaller armies, each one horribly vulnerable to attack. That vulnerability was the risk, but it was a risk predicated on the likelihood that John Pope would not attack but would instead sit tight behind his steep riverbank and wait for McClellan's regiments to swell his ranks.

  So Lee planned to divert Pope's attention by making threatening movements on the Rappahannock's southern bank, and while Pope watched that diversion, Thomas Jackson would march westward with the smaller rebel army. Jackson would march with just twenty-four thousand men, who would go west, then north, and then, with God's help, eastward until they had hooked far and deep into the enemy's rear, and once behind Pope's lines that small rebel army would cut and slash and burn and destroy until John Pope would be forced to turn back to destroy it. Then the small army, the vulnerable army, would have to fight like the devil itself to give Lee time to come to its aid, but at least the rebels would be fighting on ground of their own choosing and not attacking across a blood-dyed river. Jackson's small army was the anvil, and Lee's bigger army the hammer, and by God's good grace John Pope's army would be caught between the two.

  But if the hammer and anvil failed to come together, then the history books would say that Lee and Jackson had thrown away a country by breaking the basic rules of war. By mere tomfoolery.

  But tomfoolery was the only weapon the rebels had left. And it might just work.

  So tomorrow, in the dawn, Tom Fool Jackson would march.

  Chapter 9

  THEY MARCHED

  They marched like they had never marched in their lives before and like they hoped they would never have to march again.

  They marched like no troops had ever marched, and they did it through a day as hot as hell and as dry as hell's bones, and through a thick dust kicked up by the men and horses who marched in front; a dust that coated their tongues and thickened their throats and stung their eyes.

  They marched on broken boots or with no boots at all. They marched because Old Mad jack had told them he expected them to march, but no one knew why they were marching or where. First they marched west into a plump country unvisited by forage parties from either army, where the folk greeted the leading regiments with crackers, cheese, and milk, but there was not enough food to serve all the men who trudged past: regiment after regiment, brigade after brigade, the long hurting line of Jackson's foot cavalry head­ing west into America with dust on their faces and blood in their boots and sweat in their beards. "Where are you going, boys?" an old man shouted at the troops.

  "Going to lick the Yankees, Pa!" one man found the energy to call back, but no one except the General really knew their destination.

  "Lick 'em good, boys! Lick the sumbitches good and hard!"

  The Legion had been woken at three in the morning by bugles that had stirred weary men from a shallow sleep. The soldiers grumbled and cursed at Old Jack, then blew their fires alive to boil their foul-tasting coffee.

  Starbuck issued all the ammunition the Legion possessed. Each man would carry thirty rounds, half the usual issue, but that was all the cartridges that were left him. The men would carry their thirty rounds, their weapons, their bedroll, and a haversack with as much hardtack and boiled beef as they could carry, but they could carry nothing else. All knapsacks and heavy baggage were to be left south of the Rappahannock under a corporal's guard of wounded and sick men too weak to march.

  Daniel Medlicott, whose promotion to major had been Washington Faulconer's final gift to the Legion, came with Sergeant Major Tolliver to make a formal protest at Starbuck's orders. If the Legion met an enemy, they said, then the men could not fight properly with only half an issue of ammunition. Starbuck, nervous at this first challenge to his authority, had delayed the confrontation by stooping to his campfire and lighting himself a cigar. "We'll just have to fight twice as hard then," he said, trying to turn away their unhappiness with levity.

  "It isn't a joke, Starbuck," Medlicott said.

  "Of course it isn't a joke!" Starbuck snapped the rejoinder louder than he had intended. "It's war! You don't give up fighting just because you don't have everything you want. The Yankees do that, not us. Besides, we ain't fighting alone. All of Jackson's men are marching with us."

  The Sergeant Major looked unhappy but did not press the argument. Starbuck suspected Medlicott had talked the Sergeant Major into joining a protest that arose more from Medlicott's pique than from a genuine concern, and Medlicott, Starbuck conceded, did have cause to feel misused. For one day the miller had thought himself the commander of the Faulconer Legion, and then, out of the blue, the man he most disliked in the regiment had been promoted over his head. Medlicott maintained his protest had a more noble aim than salving his hurt pride. "You don't understand," he told Starbuck, "because you're not a local man. But I am, and these are my neighbors"—he waved a hand at the Legion—"and it's my duty to get them home to their wives and little ones."

  "Makes you wonder why we're fighting a war at all,"

  Starbuck said.

  Medlicott blink
ed at the Bostonian, unsure how to understand the remark. "I don't think we should march," he reiterated his protest heavily. "And it won't be my fault if there's disaster."

  "Of course it won't be your fault," Starbuck spoke causti­cally. "It'll be my fault, just as it'll be my fault if there ain't a disaster." A year before, he thought, his pride in being gram­matical would never have allowed him to say "ain't," but now, to his private amusement, his Boston accent was following his allegiance south. "And your duty, Major," he went on, "is not to make sure your neighbors get home, but to make damn sure the Yankees get home, and if the sumbitches don't have the sense to go of their own accord, then your duty is to send them back to their wives and little ones inside boxes. That's your duty. Good morning to you both." He turned away from the two unhappy men. "Captain Truslow!"

  Truslow shambled over. "Just Truslow's good enough," he said.

  "Your company's at the rear," Starbuck said, "and you know what to do if you find stragglers." He paused. "And that includes straggling officers." Truslow nodded his bleak assent. In addition to commanding Company H Truslow also had command of the regiment's eight surviving draught horses that had once pulled the ammunition wagons and supply carts. Now, without any vehicles to drag, they would serve as ambulances for the men who genuinely could not keep up the pace.

  The Legion marched at dawn. The order to leave their heavy baggage behind had alerted the men to the fact that this was to be no ordinary march, no stroll through the countryside from one bivouac to another, but no one had been prepared for a march as hard as this. Thomas Jackson usually allowed his men a ten-minute rest every hour, but not today. Today they marched without any rest stops, and there were staff officers beside the road to make sure no one dawdled, and there were more staff officers waiting at the first ford to make certain no man paused to take off his boots or roll up his pants. "Just keep marching!" the staff officers shouted. "Keep going! Come on!" The troops obeyed, squelching out of the ford to leave wet footprints that dried swiftly under the hot August sun.

  The sun rose still higher. It had been one of the hottest summers in living memory, yet today it seemed as though the heat would reach new heights of discomfort. Sweat drove trickles through the layers of dust that caked men's faces. Sometimes, when the road ran across the summit of a shallow crest, they would see the line of infantry stretching far ahead and far behind, and they guessed that a whole corps was on the march, but where it was going only God and Old Jack knew. They did not march in step but loped along in the gait of experienced infantrymen who knew they would have to endure this agony a whole day through. "Close up!" the sergeants shouted whenever a gap appeared in a company's files, and the call would echo up and down the long shambling line. "Close up! Close up!" They passed parched fields, dried ponds, and empty barns. Farm dogs growled from the road's verges and sometimes started fights with the soldiers' pet dogs; such fights were usually popular diversions, but today the sergeants kicked the beasts apart and beat the country dogs away with rifle butts. "Keep going! Close up!" Every hour or so one of the cavalry patrols that were screening the march from the enemy's horsemen would canter past the Legion on its way to take up new positions far ahead of the long column, and the horsemen would answer the infantrymen's questions by saying they had seen no enemy. So far, it seemed, the Yankees were oblivious to Jackson's men as they moved across the hot summer landscape.

  Men hobbled as muscles first tightened and then seized with cramp. The pain began in the calves, then spread to the thighs. Some men, like Starbuck, wore boots they had taken at Cedar Mountain, and within a few miles those new boots had worn men's heels and toes to bloody blisters. Starbuck took his boots off and tied them round his neck, then marched barefoot. For a few hundred yards he left small bloody footprints in the dust; then the blisters dried but went on hurting. His feet hurt, his legs ached, there was a stitch in his side, his throat burned, his bad tooth throbbed, his lips were cracked, his eyes stung with the sweat and dust, and this was just the start of the march.

  Some officers rode horses. Swynyard was mounted, as were Major Medlicott and Captain Moxey. Moxey was now back with the Legion. Starbuck had not wanted him, but nor did Swynyard want him to stay as an aide, and so Moxey was now the Captain of Company B. The newly promoted Major Medlicott had gone to Company A with the consola­tory honor of commanding the Legion's four right-flank companies. Moxey had the next company, Sergeant Patterson, now Lieutenant Patterson, had command of C, while Murphy's old Lieutenant, Ezra Pine, was now the Captain of D Company. The left four companies had Sergeant Howes, now a Lieutenant, in command of E, a Captain Leighton, who had been borrowed from Haxall's Arkansas regiment to command Company F, Captain Davies took over Medlicott's old Company G, and Truslow, whom Starbuck had insisted on promoting into a full Captain, was in charge of Company H.

  It was a ramshackle list of officers, cobbled together from disaster, and the men in the Legion knew it was makeshift and did not like it. Starbuck understood the disquiet. Most men did not want to be soldiers. They did not want to be torn away from home and women and familiarity, and even the most reckless young man's sense of adventure could be quickly eroded by minié bullets and Parrott gun shells. What held these reluctant warriors to their duty were discipline, friendship, and victory. Give them those things, Starbuck knew, and the men of the Faulconer Legion would believe they were the best damn soldiers in all the damned world and that there was not a man alive or dead, in any uniform in any country of any era, who could lick them in a fight.

  But the Legion had no such belief now. Its sense of com­radeship had been shattered by Galloway's raid and by the disappearance of Washington Faulconer. Most of the Legion's men had known Faulconer since childhood; he had dominated their civilian lives as he had their military exis­tence, and, whatever his faults, unkindness had never been among them. Faulconer had been an easy master because he had wanted to be liked, and his disappearance had unsettled the ranks. They were ashamed, too, because the Legion was the only regiment that marched without colors. Every other unit marched with flying banners, but the Legion, to its disgrace, had none.

  So, as they marched, Starbuck spent time with each com­pany. He did not force himself on them but instead began by ordering them to close up and march faster, and then he would just march alongside and endure the embarrassed or unfriendly looks that told him most of his men believed he was too young to be their commanding officer. He knew those looks did not mean he was unpopular, for in the spring, when the Legion had held its final election for field officers, nearly two-thirds of the men had written Starbuck's name on their ballots despite Washington Faulconer's oppo­sition, but that springtime defiance had not meant they wanted the young Northern rebel to be their commanding officer. Not at twenty-two, and not at the expense of men from their own Virginian community. And so Starbuck marched with them and waited for someone to throw the first question. The conversation he had with Company G was typical enough. "Where are we going?" Billy Sutton, newly made up to Sergeant, wanted to know. "Old Jack knows and he ain't saying." "Are we going to see General Faulconer again?" That question came from a man who had once worked on Washington Faulconer's land and who doubtless wanted to know that his old job would be waiting for him at the war's end.

  "Reckon you will," Starbuck answered. "He's just gone on to higher things. Can't keep a man like General Faulconer down, you should know that."

  "So where's he gone?" The question was hostile. "Richmond."

  There was another silence, except for the sound of boots slapping the road, rifle stocks knocking against tin canteens, and the hoarse rasp of men breathing. Dust drifted off the road to coat the bushes a reddish gray. "Story is that Old Jack gave Faulconer the back of his hand," Sergeant Berrigan asked. "Is that what you hear, Major?"

  Starbuck noted the use of his new rank and guessed that Berrigan was a supporter. He shook his head. "Way I hear it is that Old Jack just reckoned General Faulconer could be more use in Richmond. Faulcon
er weren't never happy with all this marching and sleeping rough, you all know that. He wasn't reared to it and he never got a taste for it, and Old Jack just agreed with him." That was a shrewd enough reply, intimating that Faulconer was not as tough as his men. Most of the Legion did not really want to believe that their General had been dismissed, for that truth reflected on themselves, and so they were ready enough to embrace Starbuck's kinder version of Faulconer's sudden disappearance.

  "What about Colonel Bird?" a man asked.

  "Pecker'll be back soon," Starbuck assured them. "And he'll have his old job back."

  "And Captain Murphy?" another man called.

  "Last I heard he was doing real well. He'll be back, too."

  The company trudged on. "Are we still the Faulconer Legion?" a corporal asked.

  "I reckon," Starbuck said. "Most of us come from there." The answer was an evasion, for given time Starbuck intended to change the regiment's name, just as Swynyard planned to change the Brigade's name.

  "They going to make Tony Murphy a major? Like you?" That surly question came from a tall, scowling man called Abram Trent, who sounded deliberately unfriendly. Trent's question suggested that Starbuck's promotion had come too quickly and at the expense of men who were native to Faulconer County.

  Starbuck met the question head-on. "Ain't my decision, Trent, but if you reckon I shouldn't be a major then I'll be real happy to discuss it with you just as soon as we stop walking. You and me together, no one else."