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Pale Blue Light. Skip Tucker
Читать онлайн.Название Pale Blue Light
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781603062060
Автор произведения Skip Tucker
Издательство Ingram
Then the one pipe was joined by another, and another and another until, by midnight, the air for miles was charged with a keening cacophony that sounded as if God had stepped on the tail of Satan’s cat.
All night, hundreds of pipers played their war pipes. An hour before daylight, the piping would swell, then cease. Ireland’s mists would have covered the land like a pall. No birds twittered, no foxes barked. All living things were silenced by the shattering wail of the pipes.
White silence wrapped the invaders in the wraithy mist like a giant spectral spider web. After an hour of that oppressive nothingness, the nervous invaders would be half wild. Then the bagpipe music would burst like a pent-up flood and the army would begin to move, and the invaders knew the pipers were coming, and were coming for them.
Just as the morning mist began to lift, the Black Watch would lead the Celts screaming onto the enemy ground.
On most occasions, the unnerved enemy simply fled.
This effect Canon desired. Hence the three hundred coal black horses. Hence the prayer for ground fog.
Canon awaked at four A.M. the morning of June 10 to the ground fog he wanted. He sent out scouts, then had each man in the unit check harness and weapons. And he made sure each man took at least a mouthful of food. He wanted no hunger, no weakness.
The scouts returned a little after five A.M. with word that five hundred Federal infantrymen were on the road toward Bethel. An hour later, the cavalry was strung out side by side behind Canon, who lay on the ground just beneath the rise of the hill.
By seven A.M., the fog had begun to lift. Where the hell are they? Canon had fumed to himself, checking the Krupp fifties for the fiftieth time. I need this fog, dammit, he thought, going up against a force almost double our own.
The thrumping stamp of a marching troop came so fast on the heels of his silent plea that Canon could hardly believe it. Yet here they came, blue coats with brass buttons gleaming in the misty air.
Within ten minutes, the Yankee infantry column was arrayed in front of him. He back-crawled down the hill, turned and mounted Old Scratch. Canon drew his saber, held it high in his right hand. He felt, rather than saw, the men stiffen behind him. Of a sudden, battle lust of the ages was on him, in him, filling him with a blood rage.
But inside Canon’s head, sweet music he had never heard began to thrum. That it was ancient, he knew. It sounded of thousands of voices and orchestras of strange anachronistic instruments. It stirred him in a way he never felt. His mind seemed to take on a new dimension of clarity. He saw, heard, thought with crystal clearness.
“Reins in teeth, pistols in each hand, and scream like the devil, lads,” Canon shouted. “Send the Yankees to hell!” He rose high in the stirrups. The Black Horse Cavalry, as the unit came to be known, charged over the crest and down the hill with a shriek.
The yell had frozen and confused the Federal troop. The Union soldiers looked up and saw black horses, ridden by gray men through a gray fog, crashing down on them. Hear the roar of it! The sight was terrible to them. So numb were they that not a single musket was lifted before the Confederate cavalry was upon them.
Canon segued Scratch down the hill. The Black Horse scythed into the shocked Union column. The Northerners lost a third of their men on the first pass. Canon’s sword swept through a neck, with his other hand, he fired a bullet into the brain of a Yankee sergeant.
Into and through the blue column rode the cavalry, then it wheeled as one and pounded into the enemy again. The slaughter was over in minutes. Canon doubted that fifty shots were fired by the Union column. Most had thrown down their guns in surrender, many had bolted, not a few had fallen trembling to the ground.
It was not that the men weren’t brave. It was simply that they were unnerved and in a state of true shock from the suddenness and ferocity of the attack.
More than a hundred Union soldiers died, one-hundred fifty were wounded and the rest were taken prisoner. Canon did not lose a man.
Some survivors were so terrified by Canon’s cavalry that the professor released them to return to their army. In Richmond, in Montgomery, in Washington, word was spread of the terrible Black Horse Cavalry. He wanted the word spread. It was.
The rejoicing lasted only a month
On July 11, Union General George McClellan smashed a force of four thousand Rebels at the Battle of Rich Mountain. A week later, the real war got set to begin.
Twenty miles from Washington, in a picturesque valley cut here and there by small streams known to the locals as “runs,” a Jewish merchant named Manassa had in the early 1800s opened a general store. It sat at a crossroad, a junction, of two main thoroughfares. And though, by 1861, both the store and its owner had long since disappeared, the area still bore his name: Manassa’s Junction. It became known simply as Manassas.
Through the area ran the shallow stream, the run known as the Bull. Bull Run.
Manassas was now an important railroad junction, one that both North and South considered important. Both sides considered the junction their own.
The morning of July twenty-first, Canon and the professor sat on their horses, atop Henry House hill, and through field glasses watched the Union Army move this way and that, preparatory to attack.
Finally, at ten A.M., the blue army massed and thrust toward the Confederate middle. The gray line tightened to receive the charge.
“No, no,” muttered Fool Tom, under his breath, as if to himself. “It is a feint. Our troops must not concentrate so.” Again the Union troops began a charge, and again broke it off. More grayback soldiers rushed to support the center of the line.
“It is a feint, it is a feint,” said the professor. “Anyone could see that it is a feint.”
Canon, who could see nothing of the sort, remained silent, but the professor became more and more agitated. Canon, knowing not else what to do, said, “Professor, are you sure?”
Pale blue eyes, cold as ice, turned on Canon. “I am as sure,” came the reply, “as I am known as ‘Fool Tom.’”
5
“It is a feint,” said the professor yet again. “There,” he said urgently, “is the real attack.” Through his telescope lens, at the top of his field of vision, Canon saw a mass of blue troops burst from the woods toward the left flank of the gray line.
“The flank will never hold,” said the professor, reining his little sorrel away and spurring back toward the line of woods. With mounting fear, then horror, Canon saw the Confederate left flank stand, waver, then break before the onrushing Union troops.
Canon knew enough military strategy and tactics to know the Union was “rolling up” the Confederate line. It was disaster. If the attack continued unchecked, the Northern newspapers would be proved right. The war would likely be over this day, the South defeated.
For weeks, since the Confederate Army occupied this land near a vital Northern railroad link, both President Lincoln and the Northern press had called for action. Pro-Union editorial writers promised the rag-tag Southern army would melt under Union attack like ice melts under a summer sun. It became clear that a battle loomed. When commanding Union general Irwin McDowell finally marched to the attack, there was little secrecy involved.
McDowell left Washington with bands playing and forty-two thousand Union soldiers under his command. He knew that twenty-eight thousand Southern troops, under feisty General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, were entrenched behind a little creek called Bull Run. Facing an entrenched army, McDowell counted on superior numbers to overcome the Rebel tactical advantage.
But it took the