Battle Flag

  The engineer was still thinking of shovel-grilled steaks as his locomotive struck the remnants of the first train. The cowcatcher lifted up the rearmost boxcar, catapulting the vehicle high enough to scrape along the top of the boiler and shear the lamp, smokestack, steam dome, and bell clean off the locomotive. The impact of the third train collapsed the remaining cars of the second; then the deadweight of the moving boxcars piled into the crash and drove the locomo­tive deeper into the wreckage. The wheels finally jumped the rails, and the locomotive slid sideways to a halt. There was a passenger car behind the tender, and screams sounded from the chaos as the boxcars crashed in behind. The last boxcars stopped upright in the depot itself, while deep among the wreckage at the front of the train a fierce fire started to burn. On either side of the track, well out of danger's range, men were whooping with joy.

  "Another train!" the staff officer called from the hillock, and once again a whistle sounded from the darkness.

  "We'll do this all night!" Truslow was unusually ani­mated. There was a brute joy in such freedom from all the customary and careful regulations of normal life.

  A squad ran to the depot to extinguish the rear lamps of the stalled train. Other men doused the depot's own lights so that the oncoming train would not glimpse the boxcars standing among the buildings. Deep among the burning wreckage smoke hissed from the locomotive. Men were trying to extricate the crew and passengers as well as ex­tinguish the fires as the fourth train of the night rocked into sight with its lantern flaring yellow-white in the ever-blackening darkness.

  "Come on, you son of a bitch!" Truslow growled.

  But instead of a third crash there was a scream of brakes as the engineer scented trouble ahead. Maybe it was the darkened depot, or perhaps it was the unextinguished fires that still flickered in the wreckage, but something made the engineer apply his brakes. The wheels locked to skid down the rails through a fountain of flowing sparks. The locomo­tive stopped just short of the hillock, and the engineer rammed it into reverse gear and released the steam. Smoke poured from the stack as the machinery labored to push the great train backward. The staff officer on the hillock dragged his revolver free and spurred toward the locomotive that was now spinning its wheels. The officer's horse reared away from a jet of steam; then the wheels began to bite and the tons of steel and iron and wood began to crawl away south­ward. The staff officer fired at the cab and shouted at the engineer to halt, but the engineer kept the regulator fully open, and the protesting cars gathered speed and the rhythm of the locomotive became faster and faster as the train backed safely away. The staff officer fired again, but the train was now moving quicker than his horse could gallop, and so he abandoned the chase and just watched as the train disappeared into the dark with its whistle screaming shrilly. It was clear no more trains would come this night, and so Jackson ordered his men back into the depot. There was work to do. The survivors had to be brought out of the two wrecked trains, the bridge north of the village had to be destroyed, and the prisoners had to be interrogated. The lanterns in the depot were lit once more, and the General paced up and down beneath their feeble light as he gave his orders.

  The survivors of the train wrecks were brought to the depot. Confederate surgeons worked on the wounded while food and water were fetched from the houses. One Northerner, a burly and white-haired civilian dressed in an expensive suit and with a seal-hung gold watch chain stretched across his ample vest, heaved himself onto an elbow to stare across the track at the rebel officers in the depot. The civilian had a new bandage around his head and a splint on his left leg. He stared for a long time, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the skinny, bearded, unkempt, and plain-uniformed man who snapped his orders in a high-pitched voice. The Northerner finally beckoned one of the rebel soldiers to his side. "Son, who is that?"

  "That's Stonewall, sir," the soldier said, and then, seeing that the civilian was weak and in pain, he knelt and sup­ported the man's head. "That's Old Jack, sir, large as life."

  The wounded man stared at the ragged figure who carried no insignia of rank and whose headgear was nothing but a cadet's shabby cap. The Northerner was a bureaucrat from Washington who was returning from a visit to discuss General Pope's supply problems. He was a man accustomed to the high, imperious style of officers like John Pope or George McClellan, which was why he found it so hard to believe that this unprepossessing figure with its tangled beard and threadbare coat and torn boots was the bogeyman who gave waking nightmares to the whole United States Army. "Are you sure that's Jackson, son?" the bureaucrat asked.

  "I'm sure, sir, dead sure. That's him."

  The civilian shook his head sadly. "Oh, my God," he said, "just lay me down." A gust of laughter echoed from the nearby soldiers.

  Jackson, across the tracks, frowned at the laughter. The General was listening to a brigadier who was assuring him that the Yankees had tons of ammunition, a treasure-house of equipment, and a cornucopia of food stuffed into the warehouses at Manassas Junction. "But they ain't got noth­ing more than a corporal's guard to watch over it all," the brigadier asserted, "and by morning, General, they'll have a ton of boys out of Washington to keep us at bay. And the sons of bitches, excuse my language, General, are only four miles away. Let me take my two regiments, General, and I'll give you Manassas by dawn."

  "With just two regiments?" Jackson asked skeptically.

  "With my two regiments, General, I could take hell by storm, let alone a supply depot." The brigadier paused. "You want to talk to the man?" He jerked his head toward the captured engineer who had revealed just how small was the garrison and great the prize at Manassas Junction.

  Jackson shook his head, then paused a second. "Go," he finally said, "go."

  Because the night was still young, and the mischief merely beginning.

  The Reverend Elial Starbuck had been an impatient passen­ger on the first train that left Warrenton Junction for the North. The rails were supposedly clear, yet even so the train made miserably slow progress. In New England, as the preacher proudly informed his traveling companions, the rails were capable of continuous high-speed travel, but he supposed army railroad management combined with Southern construction techniques had rendered the Orange and Alexandria Road

  incapable of matching the unsurpassed efficiency of the Boston and Albany. "Sixty miles an hour is not unusual in New England," the Reverend Starbuck declared.

  A civilian engineer spat into a cuspidor and declared that a coal-burning locomotive of the Illinois Central had been timed at over seventy miles an hour. "Long way from New England, too," he added pointedly.

  "Doubtless it was going downhill," the preacher responded, "or perhaps the timing watch was manufactured in Richmond!" He was pleased with that riposte and could not resist laughing aloud. Night was falling, glossing the car's windows with reflected lamplight. The preacher settled the bundled rebel flag more comfortably on his lap and tried to see some detail of the countryside, but just as he put his face to the glass, the train gave a sudden jerk and began to speed up.

  The engineer pulled out his watch. "Just ten minutes to Manassas Junction," he said. The rhythm of the steam engine quickened as the car rattled faster and faster over the jointed rails to shake the brass cuspidors and vibrate the gas-jet flames behind their misted lamp globes. "I suppose you'd call this a snail's pace in New England, Reverend?" the engineer called across the car. The lanterns of a depot flashed by in the half-darkness; then, just as the Reverend Starbuck was about to respond to the engineer's taunt, the window beside him collapsed in a shower of broken glass. For a terrifying few seconds the preacher was certain the train was derailed and crashing. Eternity seemed suddenly imminent; then he heard men whooping outside, and there was the alarming sight of gray uniforms and a heart-stopping glimpse of rifle flames flashing in the dark. The train gave a violent lurch, but somehow kept going. A woman passenger screamed in fear.

  "Keep down!" an artillery officer shouted from the front of the car.
Another window was smashed and a bullet ripped into the stuffing of the empty seat opposite the preacher, but then the train was running free into the welcome darkness beyond the depot. The wheels thundered over a bridge as the locomotive's whistle and bell sounded their warning.

  "Is anyone hurt?" the artillery officer called as passengers' heads cautiously surfaced above the seat backs. The rush of air through the broken windows guttered the lamp flames and scattered the pages of a newspaper along the central aisle. "Anyone hurt?" the officer demanded again. "Sing out now!" now!

  "By God's grace, no," the Reverend Starbuck answered as he shook spicules of broken glass from the folds of the flag. He was still picking the scraps from the precious silk as the wounded locomotive panted and groaned into Manassas Junction.

  "All off now!" an imperious voice commanded the passen­gers. "Everyone off! Bring your luggage! Everyone off!" The ambushed car had been bound for the Alexandria depot, hard across the river from Washington, and the Reverend Starbuck had been looking forward to an early departure from the capital on the cars of the Baltimore and Ohio. At Baltimore he planned to take a horse-drawn tram across town to the depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Road

  , where he would find a car bound for New York. Once in New York he would abandon the railroads for a cabin on one of the fast and comfortable Boston steamships, but now it seemed his journey was again to be delayed. "Take your luggage, folks!" the man ordering every­one off the train called.

  The Reverend Starbuck's carpetbag was now consider­ably heavier than when he had first come south. It was true that he had distributed all his abolitionist tracts, but in their place he had gathered some valued souvenirs of battle. None, to be sure, was as precious as the great silken banner, but nevertheless he had discovered some objects with which he expected to excite Boston's curiosity. Packed in his carpetbag were two gray rebel caps, one with a bullet hole and the other satisfyingly stained with blood, a zinc plug from an unexploded shell, a revolver with a barrel shattered by a cannonball, the knucklebone of a dead rebel, and a rusting belt buckle with the initials CSA stamped clearly on its face. The heaviest of his souvenirs were copies of Southern newspapers: ill-printed on crudely made paper and containing editorials of an evil that even the Reverend Doctor Starbuck found breathtaking. It all added up to a considerable weight that he lugged off the train before accosting the young Captain who had so peremp­torily ordered the passengers off the car. "You're preparing another train?" the preacher demanded.

  "For what?" the Captain retorted, turning around from the open window of the telegraph office.

  "For Washington, of course!"

  "For Washington? My God, uncle, you'll be lucky! Don't suppose anything will move now till first light. If there are bushwhackers at Bristoe then God knows where else they might be."

  "I have to be in Washington by morning!" the preacher protested.

  "You can walk," the Captain said rudely. "It isn't a step more than twenty-five miles, but there won't be any more trains tonight, uncle. And in the morning I daresay they'll be sending troops down from Washington." He paused. "I guess you can wait for one of those trains to go back? But this train isn't moving anyplace, not till it's been in the work­shops for repairs." He turned back to the telegrapher. "What do they say?"

  The telegrapher eased back from his machinery, which was still stuttering tinnily. "They want to know how many raiders, sir."

  "Well?" the Captain demanded of the train's engineer, who was standing behind the telegraphers. "How many bushwhackers did you see?"

  "Two or three hundred?" the engineer suggested uneasily.

  The Reverend Elial Starbuck cleared his throat. "They were not bushwhackers," he said sternly, "but rebel soldiers. I saw them clearly."

  The Captain gave the elderly minister a tired look. "If they were troops, uncle, they'd have cut the telegraph. But they haven't, which makes me think they're amateurs. But we've told the army what's happening, so there's no need to worry."

  "They've cut the wire now, sir," the telegrapher broke in. "Just this second, sir." He jiggled his key, but nothing came back. "Line's still open to Alexandria, but everything's dead to the south of us, sir."

  "So what are we to do?" one of the dispossessed travelers demanded plaintively.

  The Captain grimaced. "You might get rooms at Micklewhite's Tavern here, but if Mick's full you'll have to leg it into Manassas town. It's not far up the track, or there's a road beyond the wagon park."

  If the Reverend Elial had wanted rest and shelter, he would have used Major Galloway's house, which lay not far beyond the town, but he had no mind for creature comforts this night. Instead, with his ebony cane clutched firmly in his right hand, and with the flag and carpetbag clasped awk­wardly in his left, he set out in search of some officer who might pay him more attention than the glib young Captain. The depot itself hardly encouraged his hopes, for it consisted of nothing but great, dark buildings hastily thrown up on the foundations of the warehouses burned by the rebels when they had abandoned the depot earlier in the year, while here and there among the dark monstrosities a sentry's brazier fought the night with a small red glow. Between the huge warehouses were weed-strewn rail spurs where more materials were stored in boxcars and where long, low gondola cars carried brand-new field guns. The moon silvered the cannons' long barrels, and the Reverend Starbuck wondered why the guns were here instead of pounding the rebels into submission. The war, he decided, was being prosecuted by half-wits.

  He left the warehouses behind and stumped through a wagon park toward the lights of the nearby town. A lesser man than the Reverend Elial Starbuck might have hesitated before entering the town's main street, for the place was raucous with drunks. Most of the drinkers were railmen, but there were plenty of black folk among them, and the sight of the Negroes angered the Reverend Starbuck. Where, he wondered, were the missions? And where the Christian teachers? The town had been declared an official refuge for escaped slaves, but by the evidence before his eyes it seemed that the Negroes would have been better off in servitude than being thus exposed to debauchery, uncleanness, and liquor. There would need to be changes!

  He asked a soldier where the commander of the garrison might be found and was directed to a guardroom attached to the post office. A lieutenant scrambled to his feet as the Reverend Starbuck entered, then answered the preacher's query by saying that Captain Craig was absent. "He's gone to look to our defenses, sir. It seems there are bandits on the rail line south, sir."

  "More than bandits, Lieutenant. The raiders are rebel troops. I saw them with my own eyes. Infantry, definitely rebel infantry. I saw the same scum at Cedar Mountain, so I know of what I speak."

  "I'll make sure Captain Craig hears what you have to say, sir." The Lieutenant spoke respectfully, though he was pri­vately dubious about the preacher's report. There had been rumors of rebel raiders near Manassas every night for the last two weeks, but none of the rumors had proved true, and the Lieutenant doubted whether a minister of the gospel could tell the difference between rebel soldiers and bushwhackers, especially as even the best-dressed rebels looked little better than cutthroat outlaws. "But not to worry, sir," the Lieu­tenant continued, "Captain Craig ordered our artillery and cavalry to deploy, and he put all our infantry on alert." The Lieutenant decided it might be wiser not to add that there were only eight cannon in the defenses, aided by a mere hundred cavalrymen and a single company of infantry. Manassas was supposed to be a safe posting, as safe as garri­son duty in Maine or California. "I don't think our sleep will be disturbed, sir," the Lieutenant said soothingly.

  The Reverend Starbuck was pleasantly surprised to dis­cover that at least one officer seemed to have performed his proper duty this night. "Captain Craig? Is that his name?" The Reverend Starbuck had taken out his diary and was now penciling a note. "He's done well, Lieutenant, and I like to report commendable behavior when I encounter it."

  "His name is Captain Samuel Craig, sir, of
the 105th Pennsylvania," the Lieutenant said, wondering just how important this authoritative minister was. "You report to the government, perhaps, sir?"

  "I report to the greatest government that ever ruled on this earth, Lieutenant, or on any other," the Reverend Starbuck said as he finished writing his note.

  "Then maybe you'd like to add my name, sir?" the Lieutenant said eagerly. "It's Gilray, Lieutenant Ethan Gilray of the Provost Guard. Just the one L, sir, and thank you for asking." Gilray waited as the minister penciled his name. "And will you be wanting quarters for the night, sir? There's a Mrs. Moss in Main Street

  , a most Christian woman who keeps a very clean house. For a Virginian."

  The Reverend Starbuck closed his diary. "I shall wait in the passenger depot, Lieutenant." Much as he was tempted by a clean bed, he dared not miss the chance of a north­bound train, yet before he returned to the depot he still had one Christian obligation to discharge. "The Provost Guard is responsible, is it not, for discipline?" the Reverend Starbuck asked. "Indeed it is, sir."