THE REBEL KILLER

by Paul Fraser Collard

  The battle he had hoped for was coming.

  Ten miles north of Corinth, Mississippi, 3 April 1862

  The infantry column stopped for what seemed to Jack to be the hundredth time. It was grinding its way north, but the speed of the march was excruciatingly slow. It had been stop-start ever since they had left Corinth early that morning, and Jack doubted they had covered more than ten miles in as many hours.

  But at least the army was finally moving in the right direction. Major Denton had been quite correct. The time for retreating was over. Johnston had gathered every man he could find, and now he was striking north, his target the Union army under General Grant encamped around Pittsburg Landing.

  The poor conditions underfoot made no difference to the plan. Johnston had seen the opportunity, and now his army would have to slog its way north along rain-soaked roads. Mud was everywhere, the cloying ground sapping the strength of the men trudging through it, and leaving baggage trains and artillery regiments bogged down. The army’s first objective was Monterey, Tennessee, halfway between Corinth and Pittsburg Landing, but as far as Jack could see, Johnston would be lucky to get even half his men there.

  Jack walked in the gap between two infantry regiments, leading his horse to save the animal’s strength. It was tough going, the mud so thick that he had to work hard just to pull his boots out of the gloop to take another step. He walked as an infantryman did, his world reduced to the filth beneath his boots and the backs of the men ahead.

  He trudged on, stepping around a puddle of vomit left in a footprint. The men were suffering. Shit and puke mixed with the mud as the sick voided themselves before slogging onwards. More than a few bodies had been left to lie by the side of the road, those unable to take another step simply abandoned to their fate.

  The rain began again. It came down hard, the wind driving it into the faces of the men. Jack was reminded of another march in the foulest conditions. Then he had been in India, serving with the fabled General Nicolson as part of a large British force ordered to attack a column of mutinous sepoys at Najafgarh. The monsoon rains had reduced the ground to so much slurry, the going even worse than it was today.

  In India, Nicolson had been there to inspire his men. He had got down in the muck, helping to pull the guns along by hand, sharing every hardship faced by his men. No such example was being set on the road to Monterey. The Confederate commanders were nowhere to be seen. The officers of each regiment were doing their best, and Jack could hear the shouts of encouragement as the raw troops ground out the miles. But there was only so much these officers could do. There was little that could be done by anyone, save to endure, and take another step forward.

  Jack kept himself to himself. It was not his place to lead or inspire. For once, he was beholden to no one save himself. So he walked alone.

  The road narrowed as it passed through a thickly wooded area, so that there were still more delays as the column had to re-form to fit into the more constricted space. As soon as it stopped, men plonked themselves down in the mud, only dragging themselves to their feet when the ranks in front of them resumed the march.

  For his part, Jack stayed on his feet, waiting through the endless delays with a newly found stoic patience. He no longer bothered to look for Forrest’s regiment of cavalry. The army was advancing on three different roads and the cavalry would surely be working hard to protect the flanks of the exposed columns. But his time would come.

  For the Confederate army marched to do battle. And in battle Jack would find his man.

  The call of the fife and the beat of the drum sounded flat in the damp morning air. At least they did something to stir the miserable groups of men huddled deep under rain-soaked blankets, the soldiers forcing their tired, aching bodies to rise from the quagmire in which they had slept.

  Jack stood and shook off the water that had collected on his blanket. It had been another wretched night, with little thought of sleep. The rain had started before dark had fallen, and had only eased when the first grey fingers of dawn had crept across the far horizon. He had made a camp beneath the boughs of a large tree, sheltering his horse as best he could underneath the thickest branches, which he had covered with most of his blankets. He had saved just one for himself, spending the night hunkered down under it, simply waiting for the night to be over.

  He dumped the blanket onto his knapsack, then stretched his spine as far as he could, his hands kneading at the persistent ache deep in the pit of his back. He did not know when the column would be ordered to resume the march, or indeed if it would be able to resume it. The men were in a poor condition. This was no experienced army, its ranks full of men hardened to the rigours of a campaign. Instead, many of the regiments were filled with raw levies, their lack of discipline revealed in the haphazard nature of the lines.

  ‘Men! Gather round!’

  Jack heard an officer call for attention, his voice loud over the mumbles and muttered oaths of the men who had awoken to such a miserable morning.

  ‘Listen up! I have here a letter from General Johnston.’ The officer took a moment to move across to a tree stump that would allow him to stand higher and so be seen by more of his troops.

  Jack did not bother to move as the men of the nearest regiment gathered around their officer. He could hear well enough where he was, and the promise of words from a general he didn’t know held little attraction to him. He had long since lost his faith in such encouragement. It was what officers did that mattered, not what they said as they tried to imitate the great generals of the past.

  ‘Soldiers of the Army of the Mississippi.’ The officer read the opening line of his letter with gusto. The effect was spoiled as he broke off to cough. Only when he had hawked noisily did he continue. ‘I have put in motion to offer battle to the invaders of your country. With the resolution, and discipline, and valour becoming men fighting, as you are, for all worth living or dying for, you can but march to a decisive victory over the agrarian mercenaries sent to subjugate and despoil you of your liberties, your property, your honour.’

  The officer paused to draw breath. ‘Remember the precious stake involved. Remember the dependence of your mothers, your wives, your sisters and your children on the result. Remember the fair, broad, abounding land, the happy homes, that will be desolated by your defeat. The eyes and hopes of eight million people rest upon you. You are expected to show yourselves worthy of your lineage, worthy of the women of the South, whose noble devotion in this war has never been exceeded in any time. With such incentives to brave deeds, and with the trust that God is with us, your generals will lead you confidently to the combat, assured of success.’

  The speech was greeted with silence. Jack reckoned a fair few of the men had grasped little of the convoluted sentences. To his own ears, the words, so carefully crafted to inspire, fell flat.

  He did note the differences to the talk he had heard in the North. There, the men ordering the soldiers to war had spoken of uniting the country and refusing to allow their great union to become broken and fractured. Here, he noticed that the tone was different, the Confederate general calling on his men to fight to defend their homes from Northern aggression.

  Not for the first time, he wondered at the folly of this great civil war. The two sides were like brothers refusing to listen to one another before coming to blows, except here there was no parent to slap them apart and force a truce until hot tempers had cooled.

  He turned away, shaking his head. There was nothing civil about this war, yet he had already seen such courage from both sides. The battle at the Bull Run river had been fought by two armies full of men who believed absolutely in their cause. These men were not professional soldiers, trained armies doing a job their country paid them to do. They were citizen soldiers, men with lives and families who were willing to give up everything they had for their cause. Such a notion shamed him.

  He began to gather the things he would need to prepare for another slog through the filthy countryside, t
rying to ignore the revulsion that he felt deep in his gut. Thousands of men would die in the battle that was to come, with countless more certain to perish in the war that would follow in its wake. He was no pacifist. He knew the need for war and understood it. Yet there was something dreadfully sad in this fight of brother against brother, cousin against cousin, and it left him sickened to the core.

  South of Pittsburg Landing, 6 April 1862

  A heavy white mist hung low in the wooded valley as the army awoke to the call of the fife and drum. Jack was on his feet long before reveille. He had been too cold to sleep, and so he had passed the bitter dark hours of the night leaning against a tree, or just walking aimlessly through the encampment. He had not been alone, for he had released his memories from their cages deep in his mind.

  In those dark, witching hours of the night, he had been in the company of the men with whom he had fought before. He had remembered the soldiers in red coats who had marched up the slope towards the Great Redoubt at the Alma, and recalled the single company of defenders who had stood resolute and defiant at his side behind the barricades at Bhundapur. In his mind’s eye, he had ridden again with the Bombay Lights as they butchered the Persian Fars at the Battle of Khoosh-Ab, and he had once more climbed the breach into the bloodstained streets of Delhi. Later, he had relived the day-long battle on the slopes around Solferino in all its horror, and marched once again in the midst of the blue-coated soldiers as they tried, and failed, to turn the flank of the Confederate army at Bull Run.

  The memories had emerged with a power that had stunned him; the images of battle so vivid that once again he had smelt the tang of spent powder and the sour odour of spilt blood. Yet the memories did not repel him as they often did. Now they fed his desire to fight, and he used them, remembering the bitter lessons he had learnt, preparing for the battle that was to come with the dawn.

  Around him, the recently awoken men prepared a scant breakfast. Few had any rations left. They had been issued with enough to last for five days, yet most had eaten them all within three, lightening their loads as they slogged through the endless march and counter-march. Jack himself had nothing left save a few handfuls of desiccated vegetables and two lumps of rock-like hardtack.

  At last there was talk of the Union army awakening to their presence. There had been rumours of skirmishes, scouts and pickets clashing as the two armies came closer together. He had overheard some officers talking of achieving surprise. He paid the notion little heed. No army could march up on another without being detected, and the clashes between the outposts confirmed it. The Northerners would surely know that a large Confederate force was coming their way. What they did with that information was another matter. Complete surprise, to Jack’s mind at least, was nigh on impossible, but that did not mean that the Confederates could not find an advantage. Forewarned was not necessarily forearmed, and he had seen enough of the world of soldiers to know that even with the best and most accurate intelligence, armies could still be unprepared for what was to come.

  The call to fall in echoed around the encampment. Three days of hard matching had brought them to this point. Now the tired and footsore army formed up in column for what for many would be their last march.

  For the second time, Jack was about to go into battle on the Sabbath. The battle at Bull Run had been fought on a Sunday and had ended in defeat. He wondered if that was an omen. Just as they had at Bull Run, the men of both sides would inundate their shared God with prayers, begging him to spare them from death, or from a wound that would see them left in agony. He could feel fear in the air as though it was a physical thing, like the mist that shrouded the troops as they formed into long columns. He knew the men around him were wasting their time with their prayers. He had seen enough of battle to know there was no God present when two armies went to war. There was just death and suffering. Soldiers were forsaken by God until the last cartridge was fired and sanity was returned to His earth.

  Jack rode around a regiment of infantry as it re-formed into the two-man-deep battle line in which it would fight. The men did not look much like soldiers. Some wore grey jackets, but not enough to give them the uniform look of a European regiment. Instead they wore a mix of browns and homespun tans, an eclectic selection of headgear, and every type of footwear you would hope to see. A few even formed up barefoot. Their one common feature was the muskets they carried. As he rode past, Jack looked over the weapons the men balanced against their shoulders. The percussion-cap muskets might have been woefully outdated, but every one was clean and well cared for. The Confederate troops did not look like much, but they knew what was important.

  He headed east, riding past regiment after regiment. Experience told him that as the army concentrated for the battle that was now only hours away, the cavalry would be brought in to protect the flanks. For the first time in weeks, Jack believed he had another chance of finding Lyle and his raiders.

  He pulled up as he passed the last regiment in a line. Ahead there was a small area of open ground. It was time to find some points of reference and begin to determine where he was.

  ‘Captain! Are you the right of the line?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The captain had clearly assumed Jack to be a courier. ‘I ain’t sure what’s to our right.’

  Jack nodded his thanks, then pulled his horse around so that he took station behind the rightmost company in the regiment. It was the position he had fought in when a part of the 1st Boston. The Confederate army was drawn up in the same formation, a reminder that the two sides were officered by men trained in the same tactics of war.

  A peal of laughter came from the middle of the company to his front. Two young soldiers were squatting down, much to the amusement of their comrades. At first, Jack thought the two lads were voiding their bowels, a not uncommon sight this close to an advance. It was only when one rose to his feet that he saw that they had been picking violets.

  ‘Perhaps the Yanks won’t shoot me if they see me wearing these, them being the flower of peace and all,’ one of the young men proclaimed, much to the amusement of the men in the files around him. The pair each arranged a bunch of violets in their caps, causing the men around them to laugh still louder.

  ‘Prepare to load! Load!’

  The orders came one after the other. This regiment, like a few others Jack had seen, was armed with flintlock muskets, a weapon even older than the percussion-cap muskets he had spotted earlier. The flintlock had been the mainstay of European armies for centuries, and the ones these men held were little different to those that would have been used on the field of Waterloo nearly fifty years before. Not for the first time, Jack was glad that he had taken Pinter’s rifle. The Henry repeater was in a sheath attached to his saddle. He had the Navy Colt revolver on his right hip, and his officer’s sabre, now on longer slings as he was mounted, on his left.

  To his front, the men were loading their muskets. In unison they tore open the paper cartridge with their teeth, then emptied some of the powder into the musket’s firing pan before locking it in place. They then carefully emptied the remaining powder into the barrel. The cartridge paper followed and then the musket ball itself. With the whole cartridge now loaded, they withdrew the ramrod from its slings underneath the barrel, then rammed the ball and cartridge paper down so that it sat securely on top of the powder charge.

  Jack watched them carefully. To his eye they looked dreadfully slow, and he spotted some not putting enough powder in the pan, whilst more than one dropped their ramrod or the cartridge as their clumsy, fearful fingers let them down.

  A courier galloped across the front of the regiment, the officer whipping his horse hard as he raced to deliver a message. As he passed, the regiment began to move forward. Jack followed them as they crossed a field, the grass withered and shaded with the grey tones of winter. On the horizon, the sun was just starting to rise, the light beginning its long fight to push back the darkness. Dawn had arrived, and with it came the first signs of battle.

/>   The sound of musket fire came from far ahead. Without being ordered to, the regiment picked up the pace. Jack could see their excitement in the briskness of their movements and the sudden alertness in their bearing. The sound of gunfire came again, sharper this time. It did nothing to deter the men in the homespun uniforms.

  The regiment plunged onwards, entering the fringes of thin woodland. Jack went with them, picking his way through the trees and bending low in the saddle to avoid the lowest-hanging branches.

  An odd snickering sound came then. It was as if an enormous insect buzzed over his head. It was followed by another, and then another. The air around him hummed as still more of the strange missiles zipped by. They pattered through the treetops, bringing down a steady shower of leaves and twigs onto the heads of the men marching towards the sounds of battle.

  As quickly as it had started, the odd storm passed. Jack knew what it was well enough; he had been under fire too often to mistake it for anything else. There had been little danger from the musket fire, the shots too high and coming from too far away to concern him. Yet it did awaken a part of him that had lain dormant for many months.

  The infantry regiment he followed pressed on. If the men had been deterred by the flurry of musket balls that had passed over their heads, they did not show it, moving forward at a brisk pace. The woodland thinned, and now beams of early-morning sunlight broke through the thin canopy to light their path as they emerged into a wide swathe of parkland.

  ‘There they are!’

  Jack was close enough to the leading ranks to hear the men cry out as they spotted that there was now nothing between them and the Union army. He smiled. They had just caught their first proper look at the enemy they had talked of fighting for so long.

  The infantrymen were ordered to halt. The command came from the mounted colonel stationed at the very centre of the regiment, the instruction relayed by the captains commanding each company and reinforced by the beat of the drum.