Battle Flag

  Now all he had to do was twist the hook and start the killing.

  "Close up!" the officers shouted. "Close up!" The men marched in silence, too tired to talk or sing. From time to time a man would break ranks to snatch a green apple or an ear of unripe corn from the farmlands on either side of the road, while other men broke ranks to be ill behind a hedge, but always they hurried on after their com­rades and pushed themselves back into line. The horses pulling the guns labored under the whips, and their guns' wheels ripped the road's surface into broken ruts that turned men's ankles, but still they marched at the same cracking pace behind a cavalry vanguard that, late in the morning, rode into a small town where a Federal band was practicing in the main street. The band belonged to a regiment that had gone on a daylong route march, leaving their musicians to entertain the sullen Virginian townspeople. Those sullen people cheered up as the band fell slowly silent. The music ended with one last astonished and froglike grunt of a sax­horn tuba as the musicians realized that the horsemen in the street were pointing guns straight at their heads. The bands­men had been assured that they were at least twenty miles from any enemy forces, yet now they were faced by a gray-coated pack of grinning men on dusty, sweat-foamed horses. "Let's hear you play Dixie, boys," the cavalry leader ordered. Some of the bandsmen began to edge backward, but the cavalry officer cocked his rifle one-handed and the band­master hastily turned around, raised his hands to ready the musicians, and then led them in a ragged rendition of the rebel anthem.

  In the middle of the afternoon, with the musicians now silent prisoners under guard, General Jackson's column struck southeast on a wide road that passed through har­vested fields and plundered orchards. The men could guess where they were going now, for ahead of them was a great moving plume of smoke that showed where the Orange and Alexandria Railroad carried the Northern army's supplies south to the Yankee troops. Every bullet, every cartridge, every slab of hardtack, every percussion cap, every shell, every pair of boots, every bayonet, every small and large thing that an army needed to fight was being carried down that single track, and Jackson's leading infantry was now within earshot of the wailing, whippoorwill cadence of the locomotives' whistles. They could even hear the distant and rhythmic clatter of car wheels crossing the rail joints.

  The trains were running out from Manassas Junction, which lay only a few miles to the north. For a time Jackson had been tempted by the thought of marching directly on the Junction, but it seemed inconceivable that the largest Federal supply base in Virginia would not be guarded by earthworks and guns and regiments of prime infantry, so instead the General planned to cut the railroad at Bristoe Station, which lay just four miles south of the depot. Local people said that Bristoe Station was guarded by a mere handful of cavalry and only three companies of Northern infantry.

  Dusk was falling as the leading rebel infantry breasted a slight rise and started down the long slope to Bristoe. Rebel cavalry had ridden ahead of the infantry, but those horsemen were nowhere in sight, and all the leading infantry could see were the twin rails gleaming empty in the day's dying light and a scatter of clapboard houses from which kitchen smoke trickled skyward. The small garrison had no idea that danger threatened. A Northern cavalryman, stripped to the waist and with his suspenders dangling, carried a canvas pail of water from a well to a horse trough. Another man played a fiddle, assiduously practicing the same phrase over and over again. Men smoked pipes in the small warm breeze or read hometown newspapers in the last light of the setting sun. A few men saw the infantry on the western road, but they assumed the approaching soldiers must be Federal troops. The infantry's flags were flying, but the sinking sun was huge and red behind the rebel column, and so the Yankees could make out no details of the approaching banners or uniforms.

  The leading rebel regiment was from Louisiana. Its Colonel gave the order for his men to put percussion caps on the cones of their loaded rifles. Till now they had marched with their guns unprimed in case a stumbling man set off a cartridge and so alerted the enemy. "I guess we arrived here before the cavalry," the Colonel said to his adjutant as he scraped his sword clear of its scabbard.

  The sound of the steel on its scabbard's throat seemed to release the village to hell. For just as the Colonel pulled his sword into the sun's scarlet light, so the hidden rebel horse­men launched their charge from a belt of trees north of the settlement. Bugles ripped the sky and hooves pounded the earth as a screaming line of rebel cavalry broke from cover and stormed down on the village.

  The man with the pail of water stood frozen for a second. Then he dropped the pail and ran toward a house. Halfway there he changed his mind and ran back toward his tethered horse. More Northerners mounted up and, abandoning everything except their weapons, fled eastward. A few of the Yankee horsemen were too late and were trapped in the small village as the rebel cavalry thundered into the single street. A Northerner wheeled his horse and cut with his saber, but before his stroke was half completed, a Southern blade was in his belly. The Southerner rode on, dragging his saber free from the clinging flesh.

  Rifles crashed and smoked from the houses where the Northern infantry had taken cover. A horse and man went down, their blood splashing together across the dusty road. The Southern cavalry fired back with revolvers until their Colonel shouted at them to forget the sheltering infantry and capture the rail depot instead.

  Another volley splintered from the houses, and a horse­man was snatched back from the saddle. His comrades spurred on to the depot, where scattered groups of Northern infantry gathered under the water tower and alongside the fuel bunkers where the pine logs were stacked. The largest group of Yankees rallied around the green-painted shed where a terrified telegrapher was sheltering under the table rather than sending a message. The man was still cowering with his head in his arms when the victorious Southern horsemen scattered the infantry and threw open the shed's door and ordered the telegrapher out. "I ain't done noth­ing!" the telegrapher called desperately. He had been too frightened to send any message, so that no Northerner yet knew that the army's vital rail line was severed.

  "Come on, Billy!" The horseman pulled the telegrapher out into the dusk, where the victorious Southern horsemen were chasing the last of the Northern garrison out into the fields.

  Behind them a cheer sounded as the Louisiana infantry swept into Bristoe's single street. A volley of shots crashed and splintered into a house where a group of Yankee infantry still tried to defy the attackers, but then the village's other defenders began to call out their surrender. The Louisiana men ran from house to house, yanking blue-coated soldiers out into the street. One last stubborn Yankee fired at the attackers from a shed behind a general store and received a full company volley for his pains, and then the firing in the village died away. A few shots still sounded in the field beyond the railroad, but otherwise the fighting had ended, and Stonewall Jackson had hooked clean behind John Pope and cut his eighty thousand men off from their supplies.

  It was a feat that had been achieved by just twenty-four thousand men, who, on bloodied feet and with aching muscles and dry mouths and empty bellies, now marched into Bristoe. It was a summer's evening, and the light was fading into a warm soft darkness. They had marched more than fifty miles across country to sever the Yankees' supply line, and soon, Jackson knew, the stung Northerners would turn on him like fiends. Which was exactly what Lee wanted the Northerners to do. Lee wanted Pope's army to abandon its well-dug earthworks behind the Rappa­hannock's steep northern bank, and Jackson's job was to lure them out. Jackson's men were now the bait: twenty-four thousand vulnerable men isolated among a sea of Northern troops.

  Which all added up, Jackson reckoned, to the probability of a pretty rare fight.

  To the south of the depot a train whistle offered its mournful sound to the falling night. Smoke misted the sky; then a locomotive's lamp appeared around a bend to glim­mer its shivering reflections on rails that had begun to quiver from the thunder of the approaching
wheels. The train, unsuspecting, steamed north to where a rebel army and a Yankee nightmare waited.

  Chapter 10

  THE LEGION MARCHED INTO BRISTOE just as the train rounded the bend south of the depot. The doors of the loco­motive's firebox were open so that the flames were reflecting bright on the underside of the long, rolling plume of smoke. The train was traveling so slowly that Starbucks first thought was that it planned to make a stop at the depot; then a fountain of sparks whirled from the tall stack as the locomotive accelerated. There was just enough light remaining in the day for the engineer to have seen troops milling about the station, and, suspecting trouble, he pulled his whistle cord in warning and threw the regulator hard across to put all the locomotive's power into the great driving wheels. The reflected glow of the furnace disap­peared as the firebox doors were slammed shut. The loco­motive was hauling a light load: just two sleeper cars showing red flags to denote they were carrying wounded men, a passenger car that was routed through to Alexandria, and a mixture of unladen gondolas and boxcars that would be unhitched in Manassas junction to be loaded with guns and ammunition for the next day's southward run.

  There was a disorganized flurry of activity in the depot as rebel infantry seized whatever obstacles lay close to the track and hurled them across the rails. The most substantial blockage was formed from a pile of ties and rails that had been stacked ready for repair work and that were now hurriedly thrown into the locomotive's path.

  The whistle sounded again. The bell was clanging inces­santly, a tocsin of alarm in the darkness, while the rails were shaking with the weight of the approaching train. "Get back! Get back!" officers shouted, and the rebel soldiers scurried away from the tracks that were now bright with the reflected light cast by the locomotive's huge kerosene lamp. The windows of the passenger car flickered washes of yellow light over the fuel bunkers and water tower. Two rebels dropped a last length of rail over the track, then scrambled for their lives as the train thundered into the depot. The gilded and scarlet-painted locomotive plowed through the smaller barricades, splintered a heap of barrels and fence rails, scattered a cord of firewood as though the pine logs were mere twigs; then the engine flashed through the lamplit depot with its pistons pounding and its tall stack churning out a torrent of spark-ridden smoke. The engineer hauled on the whistle's chain as the kerosene lamp illuminated the ominous barricade of steel rails and massive timber ties that lay just beyond the depot. The train was still accelerating. Watching rebels held their breath in anticipation of spectacular disaster, then cheered as the locomotive's wooden cowcatcher struck the barrier, but the heavy barricade simply disintegrated in the face of the speeding train. There was a cascade of sparks from the front wheels, a tumbling of wooden baulks and clanging rails, a crash as the locomotive's lantern shattered into scraps of glass and metal, then the defiant whistle sounded once again as the train buffaloed its way through the remnants of the makeshift barrier and sped on north­east toward Manassas.

  Passengers had peered anxiously out of the car windows as the train swayed and rattled through the depot, but the faces vanished when a handful of rebel soldiers opened fire. A bullet clanged off the locomotive, another severed a steam line, while a dozen windows in the hospital and pas­senger cars were shattered. Most of the bullets were fired at the boxcars, which the rebels fondly imagined contained a fortune in plunder that was being denied them. The train, safe through the obstacles, was sounding its whistle continu­ally as a warning to the Federal troops ahead, though to the rebels the whistle sounded more like a mocking call of vic­tory. The locomotive rumbled over the bridge that crossed the Broad Run stream just north of the depot, then disap­peared into woods, and the caboose's twin red lanterns were the last things the rebels saw as the train hurried away. Men began firing at those lamps until officers shouted at them to cease fire.

  The rumble of the rails died, then, mysteriously, swelled again. A staff officer had ridden a hundred yards south to where a small hillock offered a view, and now he cupped his hands and shouted back to the station. "Another train coming!"

  "Pull up the track!" a second staff officer ordered. Just north of the depot, where the rails ran on top of an embank­ment toward the stream, an officer had discovered the trunklike box where the repair crews kept their tools, and suddenly the embankment was swarming with men carrying sledgehammers and crowbars.

  The second train was still a mile away, but its rhythmic noise swelled drumlike in the night as the first lengths of rail were lifted and thrown aside. The work became more effec­tive as it was organized; some troops were detailed to knock aside the chairs that held the rails to the ties, while others heaved the loosened rails off the track and down the embankment's slopes. Staff officers ordered the men not employed in lifting rails to hold their fire so that the approaching train would not be warned of danger.

  "You'll get a passel of them through now," an elderly civilian observed to Starbuck. The Legion's help was not needed to destroy the line, so its men were standing in the village street, from where they hoped to get a prime view of the destruction. "They run 'em up empty this time of evening," the old man went on. "Then they start hauling 'em back again all night and day. One-way traffic, see? Empty this way, full that. You boys come far?"

  "Far enough."

  "Right glad to see you. Yankees are too high and mighty for my taste." The old man grinned as the new train sounded its whistle to warn the depot of its approach. "That first one'll be pulling into Manassas right now. Guess those Northern boys there will be pissing themselves with worry. They told us we'd never see you boys again! Leastwise not till they marched you through as prisoners."

  The locomotive whistle sounded again. Men scattered away from the embankment as staff officers cleared the milling soldiers from the depot so that the engineer of the approaching train would not be alerted to his danger by the sight of a waiting crowd. The locomotive thudded into sight. It was hauling a train of boxcars that rattled and swayed under the moonlit smoke.

  Starbuck looked down at the old fellow who had spoken to him. "Are you saying that first train will be in Manassas by now?" he asked.

  "It's only an hour's walk that way." The old man pointed northeast. "Train does it in ten minutes!"

  Ten minutes, Starbuck thought. He was that close to where Galloway's Horse had its lair? My God, he thought, but what pleasure there would be in doing to Galloway's house what Galloway's men had done to McComb's Tavern. Then he pushed that apprehension of revenge aside as the train thundered into the village. "Hold your fire!" an officer shouted from somewhere down the line. "Hold your fire!"

  Starbuck saw some of his own men level their rifles. "No firing!" he shouted. "Guns down!"

  But the target was irresistible. The men nearest Starbuck lowered their guns, but a score of others fired, and suddenly the whole village crackled with rifle fire. On board the loco­motive the fireman's first reaction was to jump to the tender and haul on the hand brake, and for a second there was a shower of sparks from the protesting machinery, but then the engineer realized his danger and shouted for the brakes to be released as he poured more steam into the driving wheels. The train lurched forward with gouts of steam hiss­ing from a score of bullet holes that surrounded the locomo­tive with a lamplit halo of vapor through which the boxcars were dragged toward the embankment.

  The engineer ducked to shelter from the rifle fire and so never saw the missing track ahead of his train. His locomo­tive was still accelerating as it plowed off the end of the rails. For a few seconds the whole train kept going in a straight line as dirt and stones spewed in a dark wave beneath the locomotive's churning wheels, but then the boxcars began to concertina and tumble, and the locomotive rolled slowly over, spilling fire as it slid down the embankment. The box­cars piled into a heap of twisted frames and shattered planks. Jackson's men cheered as the destruction continued, and still cheered as the commotion ended. The engine had stopped a few yards short of the bridge over Broad Run, wh
ile, fifty yards behind, the last dozen boxcars still stood upright on the undamaged track. The wrecked train had no caboose; instead a pair of red-lensed oil lamps glowed at the back of the last boxcar. Some men began to tear open the undamaged cars, hoping to find Yankee luxuries to replace the stone-hard biscuit, hard green apples, and unripe scav­enged corn they had eaten in the last two days. Rightly or wrongly every Southerner believed that no Yankee could go to war without a larder of delicacies on his back, and so the rebels splintered the cars open in hopes of finding a lavish supper, but the wagons were all empty.

  A whistle sounded in the dark. "Another train!" The staff officer watching from the hillock to the south of the station shouted the warning.

  "Get back! Back!" Officers and sergeants pushed the dis­appointed plunderers away from the wrecked train, while other men stamped out the fires that had been sparked when the locomotive spilt down the embankment. Cavalry helped clear the scene so that the crew of the oncoming train would suspect nothing.

  "Hold your fire this time!" A bearded officer rode along the line of grinning soldiers. "Hold your fire!"

  "Son of a bitch won't keep coming with those lights burning." Truslow appeared beside Starbuck and nodded toward the stalled boxcars, where the twin red lamps still glowed to reflect on the steel rails. Truslow waited for some­one to realize the fact, but no one seemed to have noticed the lamps, so he took matters into his own hands by running across the strip of waste ground that separated the rail line from the nearest houses. A cavalryman saw the running figure and wheeled his horse to intercept. "Let him be!" Starbuck shouted.

  Truslow reached the train, unhitched his rifle, and swung its brass-hiked butt into the two lanterns. There was a tinkle of glass, and the twin lights vanished just seconds before the new train rocked around the western bend. A hush fell over the watching men as the train steamed past the hillock, clattered over some switchgear that led to an unused siding, vented smoke around the water tower, and then hurtled into the dim yellow light cast from the lanterns hanging in the depot. No one fired a rifle. The engineer leaned from his cab to wave a greeting to anyone who might be in the depot but saw no one and so sounded his whistle instead. The engineer was anticipating the com­forts of Manassas, where he and his fireman would cook their supper by grilling two steaks on a greased shovel held in the locomotive's firebox. Afterwards they would play cards and drink some liquor in the engineer's shed before hauling a heavy train of ammunition south in the early morning. Both men were professional Pennsylvanian train­men who had volunteered to serve in the U.S. Military Railroad, where the money was good, the liquor plentiful, the whores cheap, and the danger, they told each other constantly, pretty much minimal.