Battle Flag - Bernard Cornwell

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by a limping sergeant. Starbuck ran for the man, shouting at him to surrender. A Yankee corporal saw Starbuck and leveled a revolver that he had plucked from the body of a fallen rebel officer, but the chambers were not primed, and the revolver just clicked in his hand. The corporal swore in German and tried to duck aside, but Starbuck’s bayonet took him in the belly; then Esau Washbrook’s rifle butt slammed onto his skull and the man went down. A great tide of screaming rebels was coming from the south. The white-haired officer snatched the blue eagle flag from the limping sergeant and swung its staff like a clumsy poleax. The sergeant fell and covered his head with his hands, and the officer, shouting defiance in German, tripped over the man’s prostrate body. The fallen officer fumbled at his waist for a holstered revolver, but Starbuck was astride him now and ramming his bayonet down into the man’s ribs. Starbuck screamed, and his scream, half relief and half visceral, drowned the cry of the dying Pennsylvanian. Starbuck forced the blade down until the steel would go no farther, then rested on the gun’s stock as Truslow pulled the eagle flag away from the hooked, scrabbling, and suddenly enfeebled hands of the dying man whose long white hair was now blood red in the day’s last light.

      Starbuck, his instincts as primitive as any savage, took the flag from Truslow and shook it in the air, spraying drops of blood from its fringe. “We did it!” he said to Truslow. “We did it!”

      “Just us,” Truslow said meaningfully, turning to where Medlicott was still hidden.

      “I’m going to kick the belly out of that bastard,” Starbuck said. He rolled the bloodied flag around its varnished pole. “Coffman!” he shouted, wanting the Lieutenant to take charge of the captured flag. “Coffman! Where the hell are you, Coffman?”

      “Here, sir.” The Lieutenant’s voice sounded weakly from behind a fallen tree.

      “Oh, Christ!” Starbuck blasphemed. Coffman’s voice had been feeble, like that of a man clinging to consciousness. Starbuck ran over the clearing, jumped the tree, and found the young Lieutenant kneeling wide-eyed and pale-faced, but it was not Coffman who was wounded. Coffman was fine, just shocked. Instead it was Thaddeus Bird, kind Colonel Bird, who lay death white and bleeding beside the fallen trunk.

      “Oh, God, Nate, it hurts.” Bird spoke with difficulty. “I came to fetch you home, but they shot me. Took my revolver, too.” He tried to smile. “Wasn’t even loaded, Nate. I keep forgetting to load it.”

      “Not you, sir, not you!” Starbuck dropped to his knees, the captured flag and Medlicott’s cowardice both forgotten as his eyes suddenly blurred. “Not you, Pecker, not you!”

      Because the best man in the Brigade was down.

      All across the field, from the slopes of Cedar Mountain to the ragged corn patches west of the turnpike, the rebels were advancing by the light of a sinking sun that was now a swollen ball of fading red fire suspended in a skein of shifting cannon smoke. A small evening wind had at last sprung up to drift the gunsmoke above the wounded and the dead.

      The four guns named Eliza, Louise, Maud, and Anna suddenly found employment again as gray infantry appeared like wolf packs at the timberline. The gunners fired over the heads of their own retreating infantry, lobbing shells that cracked pale smoke against the dark-shadowed woods. “Bring up the limbers! Jump to it!” The Major, who a moment before had been tilting the pages of the battery’s much-thumbed copy of Reveries of a Bachelor to the last rays of sunlight, saw that he would have to move his guns smartly northward if the battery were not to be captured. “Bring my horse!” he shouted.

      The four guns went on firing while the teams were fetched. A lieutenant, fresh from West Point, noticed a group of mounted rebel officers at the wood’s margin. “Slew left!” he called, and his team levered with a handspike to turn Eliza’s white-oak trail. “Hold there! Elevate her a turn. Load shell!” The powder bag was thrust down the swabbed-out barrel, and the gunner sergeant rammed a spike down the touchhole to pierce the canvas bag.

      “No shell left, sir!” one of the artillerymen called from the pile of ready ammunition.

      “Load solid shot. Load anything, but for Christ’s sake, hurry!” The Lieutenant still watched the tempting target.

      A round of solid shot was rammed down onto the canvas bag. The Sergeant pushed his friction primer into the touchhole, then stood aside with the lanyard in his hand. “Gun ready,” he shouted.

      Eliza’s limber, drawn by six horses, galloped up behind to take the gun away. “Fire!” the Lieutenant shouted.

      The Sergeant whipped the lanyard toward him, thus scraping the friction rod across the primer-filled tube. The fire leaped down to the canvas bag, the powder exploded, and the four-and-a-half-inch iron ball screamed away across the smoke-layered field. The gun itself recoiled with the force of a runaway locomotive, jarring backward a full ten paces to mangle the legs of the two leading horses of the limber team. Those lead horses went down, screaming. The other horses reared and kicked in terror. One horse shattered a splinter bar, another broke a leg on the limber, and suddenly the battery’s well-ordered retreat had turned into a horror of screaming, panicked horses.

      A gunner tried to cut the unwounded horses free, but could not get close because the injured horses were thrashing in agony. “Shoot them, for Christ’s sake!” the Major shouted from his saddle. A rifle bullet whistled overhead. The rebel yell sounded unearthly in the lurid evening light. The gunner trying to disentangle the horses was kicked in the thigh. He screamed and fell, his leg broken. Then a rebel artillery shell thumped into the dirt a few paces away, and the broken fragments of its casing whistled into the screaming, terror-stricken mass of men and horses. The other three guns had already been attached to their limbers.

      “Go!” the Major said, “go, go, go!” and the black-muzzled Louise, Maud, and Anna were dragged quickly away, their crews hanging for dear life to the metal handles of the limbers while the drivers cracked whips over the frightened horses. The gun called Eliza stood smoking and abandoned as a second rebel shell landed plum in the mess of blood, broken harness, and struggling horses. Eliza’s lieutenant vomited at the sudden eruption of blood that gushed outward, then began limping north.

      Captain Hetherington led the Reverend Doctor Starbuck past the abandoned gun and the bloody twitching mess that remained of its team. The preacher had lost his top hat and was constantly turning in the saddle to watch the dark gray line of men who advanced beneath their foul banners. One of the advancing rebels was wearing the Bostonian’s top hat, but it was not that insult that caused the preacher to frown but rather the conundrum of why God had allowed this latest defeat. Why was a righteous cause, fought by God’s chosen nation, attended by such constant disaster? Surely, if God favored the United States, then the country must prosper, yet it was palpably not prospering, which could only mean that the country’s cause, however good, was not good enough. The nation’s leaders might be committed to the political cause of preserving the Union, but they were lukewarm about emancipating the slaves, and until that step was taken, God would surely punish the nation. The cause of abolition was thus made more explicit and urgent than ever. Thus reassured about the nobility of his mission, the Reverend Starbuck, his white hair streaming, galloped to safety.

      A mile behind the Reverend Elial Starbuck, at the wooded ridge where the North’s attack had surged, crested, and then been repulsed, General Washington Faulconer and his staff sat on their horses and surveyed the battlefield. Two brigades of Yankee infantry were retreating across the wide wheat field, their progress hastened by some newly arrived rebel cannon that fired shell and shot into the hurrying ranks. Only one Northern battery was replying to the gunfire. “No point in making ourselves targets,” Faulconer announced to his aides, then trotted back into the trees to hide from the gunners.

      Swynyard alone remained in the open. He was on foot, ready to lead the Brigade’s first line down the long slope. Other rebel troops were already a quarter-mile beyond the woods, but the Faulconer Brigade had started its advance late and had yet to clear the trees. Swynyard saw that Faulconer had disappeared into the trees, so he pulled out his flask of whiskey and tipped it to his mouth. He finished the flask, then turned to shout at the advancing line to hurry up, but just as he turned so a blow like

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