Battle Flag

by Bernard Cornwell

  The rest of Galloway's Horse rode north. The horses' hooves sank into the mud, but the going was not nearly as difficult as Galloway had feared. In winter, once the snow and ice had thawed, Virginia's unmacadamed roads could become impassable strips of filthy mud while in summer they could be baked hard enough to lame a well-shod horse, but this day's rain had merely served to turn the top few inches glutinous. A small and smoky fire burned under some trees fifty yards ahead, and Galloway guessed it marked the south­ernmost picket of the Faulconer Brigade. The Major eased his saber in its scabbard, licked his lips, and noted how the clouds were already reflecting the great swath of campfires that burned to the east and north. Those to the east were rebel fires, while the ones across the river were the lights of Pope's army. Only a few hours more, Galloway thought, and his men would be safe back in those Northern lines.

  "Who the hell's there?" a voice challenged from the shadows some yards short of the fire.

  Galloway, his heart thumping, reined in his horse. "Can't see a damned thing," he answered as unconventionally as the picket had challenged him. "Who in tarnation are you?" There was the unmistakable sound of a rifle being cocked; then a man in rebel gray stepped out from the cover of the trees. "Who are you, mister?" the man returned Galloway's question. The sentry looked scarce a day over sixteen. His coat hung loose on his shoulders, his trousers were held up by a frayed length of rope, and the soles of his boots had separated from their uppers.

  "Name's Major Hearn, Second Georgia Horse," Galloway said, plucking a regiment's name from his imagination, "and I'm sure glad you boys are Southerners else we'd have been in something wicked close to trouble." He chuckled. "You got a light, son? My cigar's plumb cold."

  "You got business here, sir?" the nervous sentry asked. "Forgive me, son, but I should have told you. We're carry­ing dispatches for General Faulconer. Is he anywhere about?"

  "Another man just came with dispatches," the sentry said suspiciously.

  Galloway laughed. "You know the army, son. Never send one man to do a job properly when twenty men can do it worse. Hell, wouldn't surprise me if our orders countermanded his orders. We'll have you boys marching in circles all week long. Now, how do I find the General, son?"

  "He's just up the road, sir." The sentry's suspicions had been entirely allayed by Galloway's friendliness. There was a pause while he made his rifle safe and slung the weapon on his shoulder. "Did you ride with Jeb Stuart, sir?" The picket's voice was touched with awe.

  "I just guess we did, son," Galloway said, "clean round the Yankees. Now have you got that light for my cigar?"

  "Sure have, sir." The picket ran back to the fire and snatched a piece of wood out of the flames. The fire flared up, revealing two other men huddled in the shadows beyond.

  "Sergeant Darrow?" Galloway called softly.

  "Sir?"

  "Take care of them when we're past. No noise now."

  "Yes, sir."

  The picket brought the flame back to Galloway, who bent toward it to light his cigar. Like all his men Galloway had a cloak drawn tight around his uniform. "Thank you, son," he said when the cigar was drawing. "Straight on up the road, you say?"

  "Yes, sir. There's a farmhouse there."

  "You keep dry tonight, son, you hear me?" Galloway said, then rode on. He did not look back as Darrow and his men disabled the picket. There was no gunfire, just a sickening series of thumps followed by silence. To Galloway's right was the wagon park where the Faulconer Brigade's ammunition was stored, while ahead, beyond a stand of dripping trees, he could see the farmhouse and tents that marked the Faulconer Brigade's headquarters. Galloway curbed his horse to let Adam's troop catch up with him. "You go on now," he told Adam, "and burn the farmhouse."

  "Must I?" Adam asked.

  Galloway sighed. "If it's being used by the enemy, Adam, yes. If it's full of women and children, no. Hell, man, we're at war!"

  "Yes, sir," Adam said and rode on.

  Galloway drew on his cigar and walked his horse in among the supply wagons, where a dozen black teamsters sat beneath a crude shelter made from a tarpaulin stretched between two pairs of wagon shafts. A small fire flickered in the shelter's opening. "How are you in there, boys?" Galloway asked as he peered past the fire's smoke, "and where do I find the ammunition?"

  "The white carts, master, over there." The man who answered was whittling a piece of wood into the shape of a woman's head. "You got an order from the quartermaster, sir?"

  "Fine carving that, real fine. Me, I never could whittle. Guess I don't keep the blade sharp enough. Sure I got orders, boy, all the orders you'll ever want. My sergeant will give 'em to you." Galloway waved at the teamsters, then walked his horse on toward the nearest ammunition cart that was painted white and had a hooped cover of dirty canvas. As Galloway rode he took a length of fuse from his saddlebag and a linen bag of gunpowder from a pouch. He pushed one end of the fuse into the gunpowder, then drew aside the wet canvas flap at the back of the cart to reveal a pile of ammu­nition boxes. He rammed the bag between two of the wooden boxes, then touched the glowing tip of his cigar to the fuse's end. He waited a second to make sure the fuse was burning, then let the canvas curtain drop.

  The fire sputtered down the fuse's powder-packed tube to leave a small trickle of gray-white smoke. Galloway was already assembling another small charge to place in the next wagon while more of his men were heading toward the artillery park, which was guarded by a handful of unsuspecting gunners armed with carbines. Galloway placed his second charge, then pulled his cloak back to reveal his blue uniform. He tugged his saber free and turned back to the sheltering teamsters. "Make yourselves scarce, boys," he told them. "Go on, now. Run! We're Yankees!"

  The first bag of powder exploded. It was not a loud explo­sion, merely a dull thump that momentarily lit up the interior of the wagon's hooped canvas cover with a lurid red glow. The canvas swelled for a second or two; then a fire began to flicker deep inside the stacked boxes. The team­sters were running. One of Galloway's men leaned from his saddle and plucked a burning brand from the remains of their fire and tossed the burning wood into a third ammuni­tion cart. The first load of ammunition began to explode in a series of short sharp cracks that sounded as close together as the snaps of a Fourth of July firecracker string, and then the whole wagon seemed to evaporate in sudden flame. The wet canvas cover flew into the air, flapping like a monstrous bat with wings dripping sparks. One of Galloway's men whooped in delight and tossed a firebrand into a stack of muskets.

  "Keep 'em burning, boys!" Galloway shouted at those of his men who had been detailed as incendiarists; then he led the rest of his troop in a charge toward the startled gunners. The Major's saber reflected the flamelight. An artillery sergeant was still trying to prime his carbine as the saber sliced across his face. The man screamed, but all Galloway knew of the blow was a slight jar up his right arm and the juddering friction of steel scraping on bone; then the saber was free and he swung it forward to spear its tip into the neck of a running man. Two of Galloway's troopers were already dismounted and starting to hammer soft nails into the cannons' touchholes, others were setting fire to limbers crammed with ammunition, while still more were cutting loose picketed team horses and stampeding them into the night. Saddle horses were being captured and led back to the road. A powder charge exploded, shooting sparks high into the night air. Men were shouting in the dark. A bullet screamed high over Galloway's head. "Bugler!" the Major shouted.

  "Here, sir!" The man put his instrument to his lips.

  "Not yet!" Galloway said. He only wanted to make sure the bugler was staying close, for he knew he must sound the retreat very soon. He sheathed his saber and drew out the repeating rifle, which he fired toward the shadows of men beyond the guns. The wagon park was an inferno, the sky above it bright with flame and writhing plumes of firelit smoke. A dog barked and a wounded horse screamed. In the light of the fires Galloway could see rebel gunners gathering in the darkness, and he knew that
at any moment a counter­attack would swarm across the artillery park. He turned to his bugler. "Now!" Galloway called, "now!" and the bugler's call rang clear in the night's fiery chaos. The Major backed his horse through the gunline, where the cannons were all spiked and the limbers burning.

  "Back, lads! Back!" Galloway called his men. "Back!"

  Adam was inside the farmhouse when he heard the bugle call. He had found the house empty except for two of his father's cooks, whom he had ordered to run away. Sergeant Huxtable had meanwhile chased away a group of officers standing on the lawn, killing a captain dressed in riding boots and spurs, and Huxtable now had Adam's troop lining the ditch at the end of the farm's garden from where they were blazing rifle fire into the shadowy lines of the Brigade. The repeater rifles made it seem as if a whole company of infantry was attacking across the ditch.

  Corporal Kemp joined Adam in the farmhouse. "Burn the place, sir?" he asked.

  "Not yet," Adam said. He has found his father's precious revolver and priceless saber hanging in the hall. Explosions sounded outside, then the ripping noise of gunfire.

  "Sir!" Sergeant Huxtable shouted. "We can't hold here much longer, sir!" The Faulconer Brigade had begun to fight back, and the rifle bullets were whipping thick above the farm's yard and orchard. Adam seized his father's sword and revolver, then turned as Kemp called him from the parlor.

  "Look here! Look at this!" Kemp had discovered the twin standards of the Faulconer Legion on the parlor wall.

  Huxtable called again from the dark outside. "Hurry, sir! For God's sake, hurry!" The bugle sounded again from the artillery park, its call sweet and pure in the night's angry fusillades.

  Adam and Kemp pulled the two crossed flagstaffs off their nails. "Come on!" Adam ordered.

  "We're to burn the house, sir, you heard the Major," Kemp insisted. He saw Adam's reluctance. "Belongs to a family called Pearce, sir," Kemp went on, "rebels through and through."

  Adam had forgotten that Corporal Kemp was a local man. A bullet smacked into the upper floor, splintering wood. "Go! Take the flags!" Adam told him, then snatched up some papers that lay on a claw-footed table and held their corners into a flickering candle flame. He held the papers there, letting the fire take a good hold, then dropped the burning documents among the slew of other papers. There was a brandy bottle open on the table, and Adam spilt it across the floor's rush matting, then threw a burning paper onto the floor. Flames leaped up.

  Adam ran outside. A bullet whipped past his head to shatter a window. He jumped the veranda's rail. The pair of captured rebel flags trailed huge and bright across the flanks of Corporal Kemp's horse. Sergeant Huxtable had the bridle of Adam's mare. "Here, sir!"

  "Back!" Adam shouted as he pulled himself into the saddle.

  The horsemen retreated past the farmhouse, where a fiery glow was already suffusing the parlor windows. Kemp had managed to furl the captured flags and now handed them to one of the troopers, then drew his saber to slash at the guy ropes of the nearest tents. A voice was shouting for water. Another voice shouted Adam's name, but Adam ignored the summons as he galloped toward the wagon park that now looked like a corner of hell. Flames were searing sixty feet high while the exploding ammunition spat trails of vivid smoke in every direction. The bugle sounded again, and Adam and his men spurred down the road toward Major Galloway's party. "Count!" Adam shouted.

  "One!" That was Sergeant Huxtable.

  "Two!" Corporal Kemp.

  "Three!" the next man called, and so on through the whole troop. Every man was present.

  "Anyone hurt?" Adam asked. Not one man was hurt, and Adam felt his heart leap with exultation.

  "Well done, Adam!" Galloway greeted him just beyond the small stand of trees. "All well?"

  "Everyone's present, sir! No one's hurt."

  "And us!" Galloway sounded triumphant. Another limber of ammunition exploded, punching red fire across the wounded camp. Then, from the southern darkness, there sounded a crash of rifle fire so sudden and furious that Galloway looked momentarily alarmed. He feared his men were being cut off, then realized the noise was coming from the tavern at the crossroads, which meant that Billy Blythe and his men were in a fight. "Come on!" he shouted, dug in his spurs, and galloped to the rescue.

  "I don't feel fifty," Major Hinton told Captain Murphy. "I don't even feel like forty. But I'm fifty! An old man!" "Nonsense!" Murphy said. "Fifty's not old." "Ancient," Hinton lamented. "I can't believe I'm fifty." "You will tomorrow morning, God willing," Murphy answered. "Have another drink."

  A dozen officers had walked to McComb's Tavern to cele­brate the Major's half-century. It was not much of a tavern, merely a cavernous house where ale and home-distilled whiskey were sold and where two whores worked upstairs and two kitchen slaves served huge plates of dumplings, bacon, and corn bread downstairs. Major Hinton's private supper party was held in a back room, where the day's menu, such as it was, was crudely chalked on the plank wall. Not that the Major needed to read the bill of fare, for his officers had generously subscribed to buy a rare and expensive ham that Liam McComb's cooks had boiled especially for the dinner. Captain Murphy asked for Irish potatoes to accom­pany the ham, but McComb had refused the request by saying that he would be happy if he never saw another damned potato in all his born days. "Unless it's been liqui­dated, if you follow my meaning, Captain," he said. McComb was a giant man, more than sixty years old and with a belly on him like one of his own beer barrels.

  "You mean poteen?" Murphy asked. "Christ, and I haven't tasted poteen in seven years."

  "You'll find it will have been worth the wait, Captain," McComb said, and when the supper was finished and the shirtsleeved officers were sharing a bottle of fine French brandy taken at Cedar Mountain, the tavern keeper brought a gallon stone jug downstairs. "A few sips of that, Captain," he told Murphy, "and you'll swear you're back in Ballinalea."

  "If only I was," Murphy said wistfully. "The wife made it," McComb said as he placed the stone jug on the table, "before she was taken bad." "Not fatally, I trust?" Hinton asked politely.

  "God bless you, no, Major. She's lying upstairs with a fever, so she is. It's the heat that does it to her. They're not natural, these summers, not natural at all."

  "We'll pay for the poteen, sure we will," Murphy said, sounding more Irish than he had for many a long year.

  "You'll not pay me a ha'penny, Captain," McComb said. "Roisin and I have two boys serving in the 6th Virginia, and they'd want you to be having a taste of it for nothing. So enjoy it now! But not too much now, not if you want to enjoy the upstairs pleasures later!" A cheer greeted this remark, for part of the night's entertainment would doubt­less be afforded by the two rooms upstairs.

  "But not me!" Hinton said when McComb had gone. "I'm a married man. I can't afford the pox."

  "Starbuck hasn't got the pox," Murphy said, "and he must have sneaked down here at least a dozen times." "He never did!" Hinton said, shocked at the news. "Starbuck and women?" Murphy asked. "My God, Major, it's like whiskey and priests, you couldn't keep the two apart with a pry bar. God knows what they fed him up in Boston to give him the energy, but I wouldn't mind a bottle or two of it myself. Now try the poteen."

  The poteen was passed around the table. Every captain from the Legion was there except for Daniel Medlicott, who had been summoned to Faulconer's headquarters, and Starbuck, who was under guard in Colonel Swynyard's tent. No one, not even Major Hinton, was entirely sure what fate the General planned for Starbuck, but Lieutenant Davies was certain Faulconer wanted a court-martial. Hinton averred that a court-martial was impossible. "Maybe Swynyard disobeyed Faulconer, but Nate only did what Swynyard ordered him to do." Hinton lifted the poteen jug to his nose and smelt it suspiciously. "It'll all blow over," he said, speaking of Starbucks predicament rather than the liquor. "Faulconer will sleep on it, then forget all about it. He's not a man for confrontation, not like his father was. Do I drink this stuff or use it as a liniment?"

  "Drink
that," Murphy said, "and you'll feel fifteen instead of fifty."

  "What in God's name is it?" Hinton asked as he poured a few drops of the spirit into a tin mug.

  "Potato whiskey," Murphy told him, "from Ireland. If you get the recipe right, Major, it's a drink from heaven, but get it wrong and it'll blind you for life and tear your guts into tatters for good measure."

  Hinton shrugged, hesitated, then decided that at fifty years old he had nothing to lose and so downed the colorless liquor in one gulp. He took a deep breath, shook his head, then let out a hoarse sound that seemed to indicate approval. He poured himself some more.

  "What was that?" Captain Pirie, the Legion's quarter­master, was seated beside a window.

  "That was amazing," Hinton said. "It takes your breath clean away!"

  "Gunfire," Pirie said and pulled aside the gauze curtain that kept the insects away from the candlelight.

  The sound of an explosion thumped across the damp landscape, followed by the splintering noise of rifles firing. A great red suffusion of light blossomed to the north, silhou­etting the trees that lay between the crossroads and the Brigade's lines. "Jesus," Murphy said softly, then pulled his revolver from the holster that he had hung from a nail on the wall and went through into the tavern's main room, which, in turn, opened onto a rickety porch. The other officers followed him, joining McComb and three of his customers under the porch's wooden roof from which hung two lanterns. A second explosion spread its sheet of light across the northern sky, and this time the great flame out­lined a group of cloaked horsemen on the road. "Who's there?" Hinton called.

  "Fourth Louisiana Horse!" a Southern voice called back. The skyline was red with flame, and more rifle shots cracked in the camp.

  "It's a raid!" Hinton called as he ran down the porch steps, revolver in hand.

  "Fire!" the Southern voice shouted, and a volley of rifles slammed at the tavern from the reddened dark. Hinton was thrown to the ground by a monstrous blow to his shoulder. He rolled in the mud toward the shadows under the porch as a bullet shattered one of the lanterns and rained glass frag­ments down onto the startled officers. Captain Murphy fired his revolver twice, but the sheer volume of return fire made him duck into the tavern for cover. Lieutenant Davies had followed Hinton down the steps and somehow made it safe across the road to the protection of the small church, but none of the other officers succeeded in leaving the tavern's veranda. Pirie was draped over the railings, blood dripping from his dangling hands. More blood was seeping between the planks onto Major Hinton, who was gasping with pain. Liam McComb had a shotgun that he fired up the road; then a bullet smacked into the tavern keeper's great belly, and he folded onto the porch with an astonished look on his face. His breath came in huge shuddering gasps as blood spread across his shirt and pants.