Battle Flag

  Starbuck's second letter had come from the Confederate capital. To his surprise and pleasure the letter was from Julia Gordon, Adam's erstwhile fiancée, who now regarded Starbuck as her friend. She wrote with good news. "My mother has yielded to my wish and allowed me to become a nurse in Chimborazo Hospital. She did not yield graciously, but under the pressure of poverty and to the hospital's solemn undertaking to pay me a wage, though I have yet to see that promise fulfilled. I am being tutored, they say, and so must abjure all hopes of payment until I can distinguish a bandage from a bottle of calomel. I learn, I learn, and at night I weep for the poor boys here, but doubtless I shall learn not to do so." She made no mention of Adam, nor was there anything personal in the letter; it was simply the words of a friend seeking a sympathetic ear. "You would not recognize the hospital now," Julia concluded. "It daily spreads fresh buildings across the park, and each new ward is filled with wounded before the builders' sawhorses are even moved out. I pray daily that you will be spared seeing it from one of the cots."

  Starbuck stared at the letter and tried to recall Julia's face, but somehow the picture would not form in his head. Dark hair and good bones, he remembered, and a quick intelli­gence in the eyes, but still he could not see her image in his mind's eye. "You're looking homesick," Colonel Swynyard interrupted Starbuck's thoughts.

  "Letter from a friend," Starbuck explained.

  "A girl?" Swynyard asked as he sat opposite Starbuck.

  "Yes," Starbuck said, then, after a pause, "a Christian girl, Colonel. A good, virtuous, and Christian girl."

  Swynyard laughed. "How you do yearn for respectable citizenship in the Kingdom of God, Starbuck. Maybe you should repent now? Maybe this is the hour for you to put your trust in Him?"

  "You're trying to convert me, Colonel." Starbuck made the accusation sourly.

  "What greater favor could I do you?"

  Starbuck stared into the fire. "Maybe," he said slowly, "you could replace me as commander of the Legion?"

  Swynyard chuckled. "Suppose, Starbuck, that after one day of abandoning alcohol I had told you I was finding the whole thing too hard. Would you have approved?"

  Starbuck managed a rueful grin. "Back then, Colonel, I'd have told you to wait a day, then go back to the bottle. That way I might have won the bet I had on you."

  Swynyard was not altogether pleased with the reply, but he managed a smile. "So I'll give you the same advice. Wait a day, see how you feel tomorrow."

  Starbuck shrugged. "I didn't do well today. I panicked. I was shouting and running around like a scalded cat."

  Swynyard smiled. "None of us did well today. I'm not real sure Jackson did well today, and the good Lord alone knows what happened to Lee, but the enemy didn't do well either. We're still here, Starbuck, and they ain't beat us yet. See how you feel tomorrow." The Colonel stood up. Sparks whirled past his lean face. "Maybe you should turn your companies around tomorrow?" he suggested. "Put Truslow on the right and Medlicott on the left?"

  "I did think about doing just that," Starbuck admitted.

  "And?"

  Starbuck plucked a burning brand from the fire and used it to light a cigar. "I think I've got a better idea, Colonel." He tossed the brand back onto the flames and looked up at Swynyard. "You remember what you said about Old Mad Jack? That it didn't matter how eccentric a man was, so long as he won?"

  "I remember. So?"

  Starbuck grinned. "So you won't approve of what I'm going to do. Which means I won't tell you what it is, but it'll work."

  Swynyard thought about that answer. "So you didn't really want to be replaced?"

  "I'll let you know tomorrow, Colonel."

  Starbuck spent the night in the railbed, where he slept for a few precious moments, but it seemed he was woken every time a sharpshooter let a bullet fly across the ground separating the armies. In the morning, before the mist lifted to make him into an easy target, he climbed the hill to watch the land emerge from the vapor. In the distance, beyond the trees, a swarm of smoke tendrils marked the enemy's cooking fires, while off to the left, and much closer than he had expected, a bright gleam between two stands of trees briefly showed beneath the shifting skeins of mist. He borrowed a rifle from one of Haxall's sharpshooters and used its telescopic sight to inspect the gleam. "I guess that's the Bull Run," he said to the sharpshooter.

  The man shrugged. "Can't think there's another river that big 'round here. Sure ain't the Big Muddy though."

  Nearer at hand Starbuck could see a stretch of road run­ning between two pastures. He suspected it was the Sudley road, which meant the Legion was less than half a mile from the twin fords across the Catharpin and Bull runs. He had crossed those fords a year before on the day that Washington Faulconer had tried to eject him from the Legion, and if that far gleam was indeed the run and the road really was the highway leading from Manassas to Sudley, then it meant that the Legion was close, tantalizingly close, to the Galloway farm.

  With nothing but an army between the Legion and its vengeance.

  Starbuck handed the sharpshooter's rifle back, then went downhill to where the surgeons still worked on the previous day's wounded. He talked with the Legion's casualties, and then, with a dead man's rifle on his shoulder and a handful of salvaged cartridges in his haversack, he ran back to the railbed. A sharpshooter tried to kill him as he crossed the scrubland, but the Yankee's bullet whipped a foot wide to thump into a bloated corpse and startle a swarm of flies into the warm morning air. Then Starbuck leaped the parapet and slid down into the railbed's cutting to begin his new day's work.

  Chapter 14

  THE FIRST ATTACK OF the Saturday morning was an advance by two companies of Northern infantry who emerged from the trees in skirmish order. They walked gin­gerly and with bayonets fixed, almost as if they suspected that their orders to advance on the railbed were a mistake. "Oh, my God." Captain Davies began the idiotic refrain that had the mysterious power to convulse Jackson's army.

  "Don't," Starbuck growled, but he could have saved his breath.

  "Just lay me down." A half-dozen of Davies's men finished the sentence and immediately began laughing.

  "Imbeciles," Starbuck said, though no one could tell whether he referred to the Legionnaires or to the handful of Yankees who were crossing the open ground where hundreds had died the day before.

  "Some idiot got his orders confused," Davies commented with an indecent relish. "Lambs to the slaughter, march!" He eased his rifle over the parapet.

  "Hold your fire!" Starbuck called. He was waiting for the enemy's main body to appear at the edge of the trees, but it seemed the handful of Northern skirmishers was expected to capture the railbed on their own. Such suicidal behavior suggested Davies was right and that some poor Northern officer had misunderstood his orders, or perhaps the enemy believed the rebels had abandoned the railbed during the night. Starbuck disabused them of the notion. He used just two of his companies. He wanted the other companies to conserve their ammunition, but the fire of F and G Companies was sufficient to send the Northern soldiers scuttling ignominiously back to the tree line. Two skirmishers were left on the ground and another half-dozen limped as they fled. One of the wounded men repeatedly flapped an arm as though gesturing at the rebels not to fire again. None did. "I suspect our Northern neighbors were feeling us out, Starbuck. Taking our pulse to see if any life remains in us. Good morning to you!" The speaker was the exuberant Colonel Elijah Hudson, who was ambling down the railbed as though he were merely taking a morning stroll. "I trust you slept well?"

  "Half well," Starbuck said. "It was a noisy night." "So it was, so it was. I confess I abandoned my efforts to sleep and retired into the woods to read Homer by lantern light. I was struck by the line about arrows rattling in their quivers as the archers advanced to battle. You remember it? He must have heard the noise to have described it. Those were the days, Starbuck. None of this loitering in a trench, but up with the sun, a quick sacrifice to all-seeing Zeus, and then a chariot
ride to glory. Or to death, I suppose. You breakfasted?"

  "Cold chicken and hot coffee," Starbuck said. Lucifer was proving adept at feeding Starbuck, though admittedly the boy still had the supplies taken from the Manassas depot as his larder. Lucifer's real test would come when all he had was weevil-ridden hardtack, rancid bacon grease, and rotting salt beef. If the boy even stayed long enough to face such a culi­nary test. So far the fugitive slave seemed amused at being a part of the Confederate army, but doubtless he would run whenever the whim took him.

  "My son came to see me last night," Hudson now told Starbuck, who had to think for a second before remembering that Hudson's eldest son was an aide of Robert Lee. "Tom told me that Lee arrived yesterday," the Colonel went on, "but Pete Longstreet declined the order to attack. Our Mr. Longstreet is a meticulous fellow. He likes to make certain he has a sufficiency of mud and water before he makes his pies. Let us hope the Yankees stay long enough to be attacked. Or maybe I shouldn't hope that. My boys are wicked low on cartridges."

  "Mine too," Starbuck said.

  "Well, if all else fails," Hudson said, "we shall just have to throw rocks at them!" He smiled to show he was jesting, then prodded his stick into the cutting's bank like a farmer testing the dirt at planting season. "Did your fellows suffer badly yesterday?" He asked the question in a deceptively casual tone.

  "Badly enough. Twenty-three killed and fifty-six with the doctors."

  "Much the same, much the same," Hudson said, shaking his head at the news. "A bad business, Starbuck, a bad busi­ness. But can't be helped. What fools we mortals be. I have some coffee on the boil if you want to make a neighborly call." Hudson gave a wave with his stick and strode back to his own regiment.

  Lieutenant Coffman had resumed his role as Starbuck's aide. He had been slightly wounded the day before by a bullet that had cut a ragged, dirty groove in the flesh of his upper left arm. Truslow had cleaned and dressed the wound, and Coffman kept touching the makeshift bandage as if to make certain that the badge of his courage was still in place. He bore no other badges; indeed, it was now impossible to tell that the ragged Coffman was an officer, for he carried a rifle, had a haversack and cap box on his belt, and had the half-starved, half-fearful, dirty face of a common soldier. "What happens now, sir?" he asked Starbuck.

  "That's up to the Yankees, Coffman," Starbuck said. He was watching Sergeant Peter Waggoner lead a small prayer group and remembering how another group of men had will­ingly followed the big Sergeant into the railbed's cutting, where Waggoner had swung his rifle like a club to break apart a knot of Yankee resistance. It was not so much the Sergeant's bravery that now impressed Starbuck as the fact that men had so willingly followed Waggoner into the fight. "Captain Pine!" Starbuck shouted at Company D's commanding officer.

  "Six cartridges apiece," Pine said, leaping to the conclu­sion that Starbuck needed to know the bad news of how many rounds his men had left.

  "Who's your best sergeant after Waggoner?" Starbuck asked instead.

  Pine thought about it for a second. "Tom Darke."

  "You might have to lose Waggoner, that's why."

  Pine flinched at that news, then shrugged. "To replace poor Patterson?"

  "Maybe," Starbuck said vaguely. "But don't say anything to Waggoner yet." He walked back to the south, passing the remnants of Patterson's Company C, now under the com­mand of Sergeant Malachi Williams, who offered a curt nod as Starbuck passed. None of Company C had joined Medlicott's retreat the day before, nor indeed had every man in A and B Company. The rot, Starbuck decided, was con­fined to a stubborn handful who doubtless assumed that Washington Faulconer still wielded more power in the Legion than Nathaniel Starbuck.

  Starbuck resisted the temptation to crouch as the trench became shallower. "Keep your head down," he told Coffman.

  "You're not keeping yours down," the Lieutenant replied.

  "I'm a Yankee. I lack your valuable blood," Starbuck said just as a sharpshooter in the Northern-held woods tried for him. The bullet struck a branch in the new abatis and rico­cheted up into the air while the sound of the gun echoed back from the hillside. Starbuck gave a derisive wave to his unseen assailant, then jumped down into the spoil pit, where Medlicott and Moxey were standing beside a small fire over which a coffeepot was suspended. A half-dozen of their men were lounging near the fire and looked up suspi­ciously as Starbuck and Coffman arrived. "Is that coffee fresh?" Starbuck asked cheerfully.

  "There isn't much left," Moxey said guardedly.

  Starbuck peered into the pot. "Plenty enough for Lieutenant Coffman and me," he said, then gave his tin mug to Coffman. "Pour away, Lieutenant." Starbuck turned to Medlicott. "I had a letter from Pecker. You'll doubtless be pleased that he expects to be back soon."

  "Good," Medlicott said forcefully.

  "And Murphy's well. Thank you, Lieutenant." Starbuck took the proffered mug and blew across the steaming coffee. "Is it sweetened?" he asked Medlicott.

  Medlicott said nothing but just watched as Starbuck sipped the coffee. "We heard from General Faulconer," Moxey blurted out, unable to keep the news to himself.

  "Did you now?" Starbuck asked. "And how is the General?"

  For a moment neither man answered. Indeed Medlicott seemed annoyed that Moxey had even mentioned the letter, but now that its existence was known the Major decided to take responsibility for its contents. "He's offered Captain Moxey and I jobs," he said with as much dignity as he could muster.

  "I am glad," Starbuck said feelingly. "What sort of jobs? In his stables, perhaps? Serving at table? Kitchen hands, maybe?" Somewhere a cannon barked flat and hard. The noise of the shot rolled and faded across the countryside; then a train whistle sounded in the far-off depot. The whistle was a very homely sound, a reminder that a world existed where men did not wake to sharpshooters and bloated corpses. "The General needs a pair of boot-cleaners, maybe?" Starbuck asked. He sipped the coffee again. It was very good, but he made a disgusted face and poured the liquid onto the spoil pit's stones so that it splashed onto Medlicott's boots. "What sort of a job, Major?" Starbuck asked.

  Medlicott was silent for a few seconds as he controlled his temper; then he managed a grim smile. "General Faulconer says there are vacancies in the Provost Guard at the Capitol."

  Starbuck pretended to be impressed. "You'll be guarding the President and Congress! And all those Richmond politi­cians and their whores! Is it just the pair of you who are needed? Or can you take the rest of us with you, too?"

  "We can take enough men, Starbuck," Medlicott said, "but only the right kind of men." He added the childish insult, and there was a murmur of agreement from the nearby soldiers, who had clearly been invited to share Medlicott's supposed good fortune.

  "And that explains why you're avoiding all the fighting!" Starbuck said as though the idea had only just dawned on him. "Dear Lord above! And I thought you were simply being cowards! Now you tell me you're keeping yourselves safe for higher and better duties. Why didn't you tell me before?" Starbuck waited, but neither man answered. Starbuck spat at their feet. "Listen, you sons of bitches, I've served in the Richmond provosts, and General Winder runs that crew of spavined leprous bastards, not General Faulconer. General Faulconer has about as much influence in Richmond as I do. He's promising you an easy berth just to make you unhappy here, but I ain't going to let you play that game. You're here to fight, not dream, so this morning you sons of bitches are fighting with the rest of us. Is that clear?"

  Moxey looked apprehensive, but Medlicott had more faith in Washington Faulconer than Moxey. "We'll do what we have to do," he said stubbornly.

  "Good," Starbuck said, "because what you have to do is fight." He walked to the edge of the spoil pit and leaned with pretended nonchalance on its slope. He propped his rifle against the bank and started cleaning his fingernails with the bodkin he used for reaming out the cones of his revolver. "I forgot to shave this morning," he said to Coffman.

  "You should grow a beard, sir," Coffm
an said nervously. "I don't like beards," Starbuck said, "and I hate cowards." He was watching the men around Medlicott, seeing their hatred and wondering if any dared threaten him with vio­lence. That was a risk he would have to take when the moment came, and until it came he would wait in the spoil pit that he turned into a temporary regimental headquarters. Bandmaster Little, who served as the battalion's chief clerk as well as its fussy maker of music, brought him a bagful of tedious paperwork, and Starbuck passed the time filling in the lists of dead, indenting for rations, and sending urgent pleas for ammunition.

  No ammunition came, but nor did the Yankees. The sun rose to its height and still no attack came. Once in a while a rattle of gunfire would crackle across the country, but other­wise there was silence. Two armies were poised side by side, yet neither moved, and the peace of the day frustrated Starbuck. He needed a fight to bring his confrontation with Medlicott to fruition.

  "Maybe the bastards have gone home," he told Lucifer when the boy brought him a midday meal of bread, cheese, and apples.

  "They're still over there. I can smell them," Lucifer said. The boy glanced at the brooding Medlicott, then looked back to the cheerful Starbuck. "You've been tugging on his chains," Lucifer said with amusement.

  "It's none of your business, Lucy."

  "Lucy!" The boy was offended.

  Starbuck smiled. "I can't call you Lucifer, it isn't proper. So I shall call you Lucy."

  The boy bridled, but before he could think of a response, there was a sudden shout from one of Colonel Hudson's pickets, and then a great rushing and trampling noise in the woods beyond the killing patch. Starbuck abandoned the bread and cheese, snatched up his rifle, and ran to the pit's forward edge, where a squad from Moxey's company was lying on their bellies with their rifles trained under the abatis. "See anything?" Starbuck asked.