Battle Flag

by Bernard Cornwell

"You and a score of others are saying the exact same thing," Murphy said dubiously, then showed the two men a valise stuffed with Confederate banknotes. "Half of that money is saying he won't last this night, and the other half is only giving him till tomorrow sundown. I can't give you decent odds, Nate. I'll be hurting myself if I offered you anything better than two to one against. It's hardly worth risking your money at those odds."

  "Listen," Starbuck said. In the silence the three men could hear the Colonel sobbing. There was a light in Swynyard's tent, and the Colonel's monstrous shadow was rocking back and forth as he prayed for help. His two slaves, who had been utterly taken aback by the change in their master's demeanor, crouched helplessly outside.

  "The poor bastard," Murphy said. "It's almost enough to stop you from drinking in the first place."

  "Two to one on?" Starbuck asked. "For tomorrow night?"

  "Are you sure you don't want to put your money on tonight?" Murphy asked.

  "He's survived this far," Truslow said. "He'll be asleep soon." -

  "For tomorrow night, then," Murphy said and took Starbuck's two dollars and then the two dollars that Sergeant Truslow had offered. When the wagers were recorded in Murphy's book, Starbuck walked back past the Colonel's tent and saw Lieutenant Davies on his knees beside the entrance.

  "What the ..." Starbuck began, but Davies turned with his finger to his lips. Starbuck peered closer and saw that the Lieutenant was pushing a half-full bottle of whiskey under the flap.

  Davies backed away. "I've got thirty bucks riding on tonight, Nate," he whispered as he climbed to his feet, "so I thought I'd help the money."

  "Thirty bucks?"

  "Even odds," Davies said, then dusted the dirt off his pants. "Reckon I'm onto a sure thing. Listen to the bastard!"

  "It's not fair to do that to a man," Starbuck said sternly. "You should be ashamed of yourself!" He strode to the tent, reached under the flap, and took out the whiskey.

  "Put it back!" Davies insisted.

  "Lieutenant Davies," Starbuck said, "I will personally pull your belly out of your goddamned throat and shove it up your stinking backside if I ever find you or anyone else trying to sabotage that man's repentance. Do you understand me?" He took a step closer to the tall, pale, and bespectacled Lieutenant. "I'm not goddamn joking, Davies. That man's trying to redeem himself, and all you can do is mock him! Christ Almighty, but that makes me angry!"

  "All right! All right!" Davies said, frightened by Starbuck's vehemence.

  "I'm serious, Davies," Starbuck said, although the Lieutenant had never actually doubted Starbuck's sincerity. "I'll goddamn kill you if you try this again," Starbuck said. "Now go away." Starbuck watched the Lieutenant vanish into the night, then let out a long sigh of relief. "We'll keep this for tomorrow night, Sergeant," he told Truslow, flourish­ing the whiskey that Davies had abandoned.

  "Then put it into Swynyard's tent?"

  "Exactly. God damn Davies's thirty bucks. I need money far more than he does."

  Truslow walked on beside his Captain. "What that suffer­ing bastard Swynyard really likes is good brandy."

  "Then maybe we can find some on the battlefield tomor­row," Starbuck said, and that discovery seemed a distinct possibility, for although three days had passed since the battle, there were still wounded men lying in the woods or hidden in the broken stands of corn. Indeed, there were so many dead and wounded that the rebels alone could not retrieve all the casualties, and so a truce had been arranged and troops from General Banks's army had been invited to rescue their own men.

  The day of the truce dawned hot and sultry. Most of the Legion had been ordered to help search the undergrowth in the belt of trees where the Yankee attack had stalled, but Starbuck's company was set to tree-felling and the con­struction of a massive pyre on which the dead horses of the Pennsylvanian cavalry were to be burned. On the turnpike behind the pyre a succession of light-sprung Northern ambulances carried away the Yankee wounded. The Northern vehicles, specially constructed for their purpose, were in stark contrast to the farm carts and captured army wagons that the rebels used as ambulances, just as the uni­formed and well-equipped Northern soldiers looked so much smarter than the rebel troops. A Pennsylvanian captain in charge of the detail loading the ambulances sauntered down to Starbuck's men and had to ask which of the ragamuffins was their officer. "Dick Levergood," he introduced himself to Starbuck.

  "Nate Starbuck."

  Levergood companionably offered Starbuck a cigar and a drink of lemonade. "It's crystallized essence," he said, apolo­gizing for the lemonade that was reconstituted from a powder mix, "but it doesn't taste bad. My mother sends it."

  "You'd rather have whiskey?" Starbuck offered Levergood a bottle. "It's good Northern liquor," Starbuck added mis­chievously.

  Other Pennsylvanians joined the Legionnaires. News­papers were exchanged and twists of tobacco swapped for coffee, though the briskest trade was in Confederate dollars. Every Northerner wanted to buy Southern scrip to send home as a souvenir, and the price of the ill-printed Southern money was rising by the minute. The men made their trades beside the great pyre that was a sixty-foot-long mound of newly cut pine logs on which a company of Confederate gunners was now piling the horses. The artillerymen were using a sling-cart that had a lifting frame bolted to its bed. The wagon's real purpose was rescuing dismounted cannon barrels, but now its crane jib hoisted the rotting horse car­casses six feet in the air, then swung them onto the logs, where a team of men with their mouths and nostrils scarfed against the stink levered the swollen corpses into place with handspikes. Another two masked men splashed kerosene on the pyre.

  Captain Levergood peered at the sling-cart. "That's one of ours."

  "Captured." Starbuck confirmed the cart's Northern ori­gins; indeed the sling-cart still had the letters USA stenciled on its backboard.

  "No, no," Levergood said. "One of my family's carts. We manufacture them in Pittsburgh. We used to make sulkies, buggies, Deerborns, and horsecars, now we mostly make army wagons. A hundred wagons a month and the govern­ment pays whatever we ask. I tell you, Starbuck, if you want to make a fortune, then work for the government. They pay more for a seven-ton wagon than we ever dared charge for an eight-horse coach with leather seats, stove, silk drapes, turkey carpets, and silver-gilt lamps."

  Starbuck drew on his cigar. "So why are you being shot at here instead of building carts in Pittsburgh?"

  Levergood shrugged. "Wanted to fight for my country." He sounded embarrassed at making the confession. "Mind you, I never dreamed the war would last; more than a summer."

  "Nor did we," Starbuck said. "We reckoned one good battle to teach you a lesson and that would be the sum of it."

  "Reckon we must be slow learners," Levergood said affably. "Mind you, it won't be long now."

  "It won't?" Starbuck asked, amused.

  "McClellan's leaving the peninsula, that's what we hear. His men are sailing north and in another couple of weeks his army will be alongside ours and then we'll be down on you like a pack of wolves. Pope's army and McClellan's com­bined. You'll be crushed like a soft grape. I just hope there are enough beds in Richmond to take care of us all."

  "There are plenty of prison beds there," Starbuck said, "but their mattresses ain't too soft."

  Levergood laughed, then turned as a voice boomed from the road. "Read it! Read it! Let the word of God work its grace on your sinful souls. Here! Take and read, take and read." An older man dressed in preacher's garb was distribut­ing tracts from horseback, scattering the leaflets down to the rebel soldiers beside the road.

  "Jesus!" Starbuck said in astonishment.

  "The Reverend Elial Starbuck," Levergood said with evi­dent pride that such a famous man was present. "He preached to us yesterday. My, but he's got a rare tongue in him. It seems he's close to our high command and they've promised him the honor of preaching the very first sermon in liberated Richmond." Levergood paused, then frowned. "You're called Starbuck, too. Are y
ou related?"

  "Just a coincidence," Starbuck said. He edged around the end of the pyre. He had faced battle with evident courage, but he could not face his father. He went to where Esau Washbrook was mounting a solitary guard over the com­pany's stacked weapons. "Give me your rifle, Washbrook," he said.

  Washbrook, the company's best marksman, had equipped himself with a European-made sniper's rifle: a heavy long-range killing machine with a telescopic sight running along­side the barrel. "You're not going to kill the man, are you?" Levergood asked. The Pennsylvanian had followed Starbuck from the road.

  "No." Starbuck aimed the rifle at his father, inspecting him through the telescopic sight. The gunners had set fire to the horses' funeral pyre, and the smoke was beginning to whip across Starbuck's vision while the heat of the fire was quivering the image held in the gun's crosshairs. His father, astonishingly, looked happier than Starbuck had ever seen him. He was evidently exulting in the stench of death and the remnants of battle.

  "The flames of hell will burn brighter than these fires!" the preacher called to the rebels. "They will burn for all eter­nity and lap you with insufferable pain! That is your certain fate unless you repent now! God is reaching His hand out for you! Repent and you will be saved!"

  Starbuck lightly touched the trigger, then felt ashamed of the impulse and immediately lowered the gun. For a second it seemed that his father had stared straight at him, but doubtless the preacher's own vision had been smeared by the shimmer of smoky heat, for he had looked away without recognition before riding back toward the Federal lines.

  The flames of the pyre leaped higher as fat from the car­casses ran down to sizzle among the logs. The last ambu­lances were gone north and with them the final wagons carrying the Yankee dead. Bugles now called the Yankee living back to their own lines, and Captain Levergood held out his hand. "Guess we'll meet again, Nate."

  "I'd like that." Starbuck shook the Northerner's hand.

  "Kind of crazy, really," Levergood said in half-articulated regret at meeting an enemy he so liked; then he shrugged. "But watch out next time we meet. McClellan will be lead­ing us, and McClellan's a regular tiger. He'll have you beat soon enough."

  Starbuck had met the tiger once and had watched him being beaten, too, but he said nothing of that meeting nor of the beating. "Be safe," he told Levergood.

  "You too, friend."

  The Northerners marched away pursued by the evil-smelling smoke of the burning carcasses. "Did you know your father was here?" Colonel Swynyard's harsh voice suddenly sounded behind Starbuck.

  Starbuck turned. "I saw him, yes."

  "I spoke with him," Swynyard said. "I told him I had the honor to command his son. You know what he said?" Swynyard paused to dramatize the moment, then grinned. "He said he had no son called Nathaniel. You do not exist, he said. You have been written out from his life; expunged, condemned, disinherited. I said I would pray that you would be reconciled."

  Starbuck shrugged. "My father ain't the reconciling kind, Colonel."

  "Then you will have to forgive him instead," Swynyard said. "But first get your fellows ready to march. We're pulling back over the Rapidan."

  "Tonight?"

  "Before first light tomorrow. It'll be a fast march, so tell your boys not to carry unnecessary baggage. Can't have them laden down with things like this, eh, Starbuck?" Swynyard took a bottle of brandy from his pocket. "Found this in my tent, Starbuck. Just after you took that whiskey away. I heard you reprove Davies, and I'm grateful that you did, but a dozen other people brought me liquor anyway."

  Starbuck felt a twinge of shame at having planned to place Davies's whiskey back in Swynyard's tent this very night. "Were you tempted?" he asked the Colonel.

  "Of course I was tempted. The devil has not relinquished me yet, Starbuck, but I shall beat him." Swynyard gauged the distance to the funeral pyre, then heaved the brandy at the flames. The bottle scored a direct hit, breaking to splash a pale blue light in the heart of the fire. "I'm saved, Starbuck," Swynyard said, "so tell Murphy's friends to keep their liquor to themselves."

  "Yes, Colonel. I'll do that," Starbuck said, then walked back to Sergeant Truslow. "He's saved and we're poor, Sergeant," Starbuck said. "I reckon we've just lost our damned money."

  Truslow spat in the dust. "Bugger may not last the night," he said.

  "Two bucks says he will."

  Truslow thought about it for a second. "What two bucks?" he finally asked.

  "The two bucks I'll win from you tomorrow morning if Swynyard lasts the night."

  "Forget it."

  The smoke blew north, there to meld with dark clouds that heaped in the summer sky. Somewhere beneath those clouds the armies of the United States were gathering to march south, and Jackson's men, outnumbered, could only retreat.

  Adam waited with his troop at a place where he had a view toward the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. He was watching for partisans, but Sergeant Tom Huxtable kept glancing back toward the farmhouse. "Tidy place," he finally commented.

  "Kind of house a man could live in forever," Adam agreed.

  "But not after Billy Blythe's finished searching it." Huxtable could no longer keep his concern silent. "Our job's to hunt down rebels," he said, "not persecute womenfolk."

  Adam was acutely uncomfortable with this direct criti­cism of his fellow officer. He suspected the criticism might be justified, but Adam always tried to give all men the bene­fit of the doubt, and now he tried to find some saving grace in Blythe's character. "The Captain's simply investigating gunfire, Sergeant. I didn't hear anything said of womenfolk."

  "Gunfire that Seth Kelley shot," Huxtable said, "like as not."

  Adam kept silent while he examined the woods and fields to the south. The trees lay still in the windless air as he turned the field glasses back to the mountains.

  "A man should have beliefs, you see," Sergeant Huxtable said. "A man without beliefs, Captain, is a man without purpose. Like a ship without a compass."

  Adam still said nothing. He turned the glasses northward. He watched an empty track, then slid the lenses across a wooded ridge.

  Huxtable shifted his lump of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. He had been a cooper in his native Louisiana and then apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in his wife's village in upstate New York. When the war had broken out, Tom Huxtable had visited the white-spired vil­lage church, knelt in prayer for twenty minutes, then gone home and taken his rifle from its hooks over the fireplace, a Bible from the drawer in the kitchen table, and a knife from his workshop. Then he had told his wife to keep the squash well watered and gone to join the Northern army. His grand­father had been killed by the British to establish the United States of America, and Tom Huxtable was not minded to let that sacrifice go for nothing.

  "It mayn't be my place to say it," Huxtable now went remorselessly on, "but Captain Blythe don't have a belief in his body, sir. He'd fight for the devil if the pay was right." Adam's men were of a like mind with their Sergeant and murmured agreement. "Mr. Blythe's not in the North by choice, Captain," Huxtable continued doggedly. "He says he's fighting for the Union, but we hear he left his home­town a pace ahead of a lynching party. There's talk of a girl, Captain. A white girl of good family. She says Mr. Blythe wrestled her down and—"

  "I don't want to know!" Adam said abruptly. Then, thinking he had spoken too fiercely, he turned apolo­getically to his Sergeant. "I'm sure Major Galloway has considered all this."

  "Major Galloway's like yourself, sir. A decent man who doesn't believe in evil."

  "And you do?" Adam asked.

  "You've seen the plantations in the deep South, sir?" Huxtable asked. "Yes, sir, I believe in evil."

  "Sir!" The conversation was interrupted by one of Adam's men, who pointed northward. Adam turned and raised the field glasses. For a second his view was of nothing but blurred leaves; then he focused the lenses to see mounted men on a crestline. He counted a dozen riders, but guessed there were more. They w
ere not in uniform but carried rifles slung from their shoulders or thrust into saddle holsters. A second group of horsemen came into view. They had to be partisans: the Southern horsemen who rode Virginia's secret paths to harass the Northern armies.

  Huxtable stared at the distant horsemen. "Captain Blythe will run away," he said disgustedly.

  "He needs to be warned. Come on." Adam led his troop down from the hilltop. They spurred east, and Adam wished their horses were not so decrepit.

  The parched lawn in front of the farmhouse was now a bizarre array of furniture and household goods, which Blythe's men were picking through in search of plunder. There were buckets, spittoons, pictures, lamps, and rush-bottom chairs. There was a sewing machine, a long case clock, two butter churns, a chamber pot, and meal sifters. Some men were trying on suits of clothes while two more were swathed in women's scarves. A man threw a bolt of cloth from an upstairs window, and the bright cloth cas­caded across the veranda roof and down to where the horses were picketed in the flower beds. "Where's Captain Blythe?" Adam demanded of one of the scarfed men.

  "In the barn, Cap'n, but he won't thank you for finding him there," the man answered. Children screamed in the house. Adam threw his reins to Sergeant Huxtable, then ran to the barn, where Corporal Kemble was standing guard. "You can't go in, sir," the Corporal said unhappily.

  Adam just pushed past the Corporal, unlatched the door, and pushed into the barn. Two empty horse stalls were on the right, an oat cutter stood in the floor's center, while a mound of hay filled the barn's farther end. Blythe was in the hay, struggling with a crying woman.

  "Bitch!" Blythe said, slapping her. "Goddamned bitch!" There was the sound of cloth ripping; then Blythe realized the door had been thrown open, and he turned angrily around. "What the hell do you want?" He could not recognize the intruder who was silhouetted against the light outside.

  "Leave her alone, Blythe!" Adam said.

  "Faulconer? You son of a bitch!" Blythe scrambled to his feet and brushed scraps of hay from his hands. "I'm just ques­tioning this lady, and what I do here is none of your damned business."