There was to be no easy victory on that bloody ground. By rights, the remains of the Union army should have been destroyed or captured, yet it appeared no one had told them that.
Instead they were launching an attack of their own.
Jack and Martha rode through an army thrown into disorder. They were forced to halt as another regiment hurried forward, blocking their path. It gave them the chance to run their eyes over the tired men and their thinned ranks. These were the men who had marched at dawn the previous morning and then fought all day. It was obvious they were in no condition to fight again, yet here they were, double-timing forward as attack turned to desperate defence.
Jack watched as the regiment took up a position beside a battery of guns that was already hotly engaged. Every gun was firing as fast as it could be reloaded. Each shot drove the cannon backwards, the heavy wheels gouging great crevices in the dirt. The men serving them had no time to reposition them, simply loading them where they stood before firing again, the guns spitting great gouts of flame as they flung another salvo at their unseen target.
‘We’re going to have to make this quick.’ Jack had seen enough of war to recognise the signs of an army fighting for its life. He could only surmise that somehow the near-beaten Union army had been reinforced. He had seen it before, at Bull Run. Then it had been Southern reinforcements arriving to save the day, the fresh troops brought to the battlefield by railroad in time to shore up the Confederates’ battered left flank. Now the Union army must have conjured up support enough to turn the tide of the battle.
‘Over there.’ Martha tapped him on the shoulder, then pointed at a small group of tents, a yellow flag flying from a pole in their midst.
The aid station should have been far from the fighting. Yet the battle had turned so fast that it would soon find itself on the front line. As Jack rode towards it, the regiment they had seen taking position around the battery of cannon went into action.
He reined in, bringing the horse to a stand.
‘Go on then.’ He gave the curt command. He had no intention of getting down to join the search.
Martha did as she was bid. She was out of the saddle and running across the ground as the sound of the regiment firing a second volley seared through the air.
Jack watched her go, hoping she would not take long. The aid station comprised no more than four tents, and even at first glance he could see that it was overwhelmed. Temporary shelters had been rigged in all directions, with blankets draped over tree branches to provide some shelter for the wounded.
Bodies lay all around. Some were clearly dead, and more than one corpse was sprawled in a pool of bloody rainwater. The dead were surrounded by the most badly wounded. Some were whole, but many were missing whole limbs, or hands, or even faces. Those still living were swathed in blood-sodden bandages. A few orderlies tended the long lines of wounded, removing blood-soaked dressings or passing around a bottle of whiskey, the harsh spirit the only way of easing the men’s pain. Some men screamed as the agony wormed its way through their broken bodies. Others wept, or called for their mothers, or simply for a bullet to end their suffering. Many lay in silence, or else murmured prayers for deliverance from the hopeless misery in which they found themselves.
To one side of the largest tent, Jack saw a hideous heap of amputated feet, legs, arms and hands. Yet even that revolting sight was better than looking at the great pile of dead bodies next to it. The dead had been dumped without ceremony. Now they lay in a single monstrous mass, their bodies stuck in grotesque, unnatural poses. Sightless eyes stared out of the pile, faces frozen in expressions of agony for all time.
He turned his head and spat as the stench of the place wormed its way into his gullet. The air was polluted by the foul miasma of blood and shit, the fetid stench of torn and ruined flesh catching the back of his throat. He spat again to try to scour the acrid taste from his mouth.
‘He’s not here,’ Martha called out as she returned, breathless.
Jack had not heard her approach. He helped her into the saddle, doing his best not to look at the dreadful place in which she had searched for her husband.
‘There’s another aid post about half a mile from here. An orderly told me that some men from the 65th are there.’
Jack accepted the grim news without another word. He kicked the horse back into motion.
Behind him the gunners and the infantrymen fired without pause.
The second aid station they approached was in no better condition than the first.
The ground around the huddle of tents was littered with the bodies of the dead and dying, and just a glance towards the tents revealed another shocking mountain of corpses and body parts.
More wounded were arriving all the time. Some walked in, hands pressed to the rents in their flesh, their uniforms bloodied to the elbows from where they had tried in vain to staunch the bleeding. Others hobbled in, or else used their muskets as crutches. A fair few were carried in by friends. There were always men eager to quit the battlefield, and the act of assisting a mate was a better reason than most. More rarely, a man was brought in on a stretcher, the bearers attached to each regiment overwhelmed by the sheer numbers being wounded in the fierce fighting that had begun the second day of battle.
A covered ambulance came by. It was pulled by a pair of mules and carried two men. One glance told Jack that the men were officers, their insignia securing them passage to the rear and the more substantial aid stations. Yet their rank had not spared them the reality of battle, and Jack saw blood trickling down the sides of the ambulance.
He looked for more ambulances, or for farm wagons pressed into service to take the wounded away from the field of battle. There were a few, but nowhere near enough to bear the hundreds of men who needed them. The ones he saw were all filled with officers, the men with the gold braid on their uniforms guaranteed a berth away from the fighting.
‘Come with me,’ Martha demanded as she slid from the saddle.
Jack did not demur. He vowed this would be their final search. If they failed to find Martha’s husband this time, he would force her to quit, even if he had to knock her down.
He tied the horse’s reins to a tree branch, then followed Martha through the lines of bodies. He did not look at the suffering that surrounded him, just as he paid no heed to the men who begged for him to stop and offer aid.
He said nothing as Martha spoke to an orderly who was working his way along the line of bodies, offering each man the choice of a mouthful of brackish water from an iron pail or a slug of whiskey from the bottle he carried. Few chose water. Her enquiry was met with a pointed finger, the orderly gesturing towards one of the tents at the centre of the aid station.
Martha walked away with whatever answer she had been given to her enquiry. Unlike Jack, she did look at the wounded, her head moving slowly from side to side as she searched for the man she had married.
One of the men started to scream. The heart-rending cries went on and on, each one longer than the one before, until they were cut off abruptly. Somewhere else a broken soldier was praying, his voice loud as he beseeched God for aid in his hour of need.
Martha walked on. Jack saw her arms clamp around her chest, as if she were holding in a scream of her own. Yet her pace did not alter, even as men begged for her to stop.
‘Shoot me!’ A man reached out to pluck at Jack’s ankles as he walked past. ‘I beg you.’
Jack looked down. The soldier had been shot in the groin. The lower half of his body was sheeted in blackened blood. There was no saving a man with a wound like that, and so he had been laid on the ground, the orderlies who had brought him there not even bothering to waste a bandage on his ruined flesh.
‘You hear me, friend?’ The man’s fingers scrabbled at the hem of Jack’s trousers. ‘You hear me?’ His voice vibrated with desperation and fear. ‘Shoot me, friend, please, I beg you. I beg you!’
Jack stepped away, pulling his leg from the man’s grasping f
ingers. He forced himself to feel nothing.
Martha ducked inside one of the tents. She came out a few moments later, her face the colour of old milk, and looked back at Jack. He was close enough to see the tears that streamed down her face.
She turned and walked on, then ducked into another of the tents. This time she did not come back out, so Jack followed her.
The air inside was foul. The stink of canvas mixed with the raw odour of sweat, blood and shit to create a hideous stench that made him want to gag. He saw Martha immediately. She was crouched down next to a man Jack had once beaten bloody.
She had found what she was looking for. She had found her husband.
Martha’s husband was alive. He sat on the ground, his back resting against one of the tent’s supporting poles. He was in his shirtsleeves, and the entire right side of his body was stained black with old blood.
‘John?’ Martha reached out a finger to touch his cheek. ‘John, it’s me.’
Life flickered into red-rimmed eyes. ‘Martha?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’ Fresh tears streamed down Martha’s cheeks, scouring clean paths through the grime that covered them.
‘Thank the Lord.’ John breathed the words. ‘I got hit, Martha. I got hit bad.’ He spoke like a child, the words simple. ‘I lost my hand.’ Like a toddler displaying a special pebble, he lifted his right arm to show the evidence. There was little of it left below the elbow. The amputation had taken off his hand and most of his lower arm. The stump was bound in a blood-soaked bandage.
‘I see that.’ Martha reached out and gently set her husband’s ruined arm back in his lap. ‘Now don’t you worry none. I’m here now. I’ll take care of you.’
‘You will?’ John’s voice betrayed his confusion.
‘I will.’ Martha spoke calmly; the voice of a mother to a child scared by a nightmare. ‘It’s going to be all right.’ She rocked back on her haunches. ‘We’re taking him with us.’
‘How the hell are we going to do that?’ Jack had known this was coming the moment he had seen her crouching next to her husband.
‘We put him on the horse.’
‘He’s in no fit state to be moved.’
‘We can’t leave him here.’ Martha pushed herself to her feet and came towards Jack, her eyes blazing. ‘I won’t do it.’
‘You have to.’
‘I won’t. If you won’t take us, then I’ll stay here with him.’
‘The entire Union army is headed this way. God alone knows how, but it is. We try to ride away with him and none of us will make it. Do you understand that?’
‘He’s my husband. I ain’t leaving him for them Yankees.’
‘You’ll do as Jack says.’ This time it was John who spoke. His voice was steady and firm now, the contrast to moments before stark. ‘You’ll do as you’re damn well told, woman.’
‘I’m not leaving you, John.’ Martha shook her head.
‘No. You need to go.’
‘It’s not your decision.’
‘Goddam you, woman, will you never do as you are told.’ The words came back at Martha, hot and angry. John lifted his good arm and pointed a bloodied finger in her direction. ‘You’ll leave right this minute, you hear me? I don’t want you here. I don’t want you at all. So you do as you are goddam told and get out of here.’
Martha recoiled from the anger in his harsh words. The memory of a hundred beatings was written in her expression.
‘You heard him.’ Jack was watching John’s face. He was lucid now, the confusion that had greeted their arrival replaced with what appeared to be anger. But Jack had been an impostor and a liar for a decade or more. He knew when a man lied.
‘Let’s go.’ He reached out and pulled at Martha’s elbow, only for her to shake him off.
She stood still, her spine straight as she looked at John for several long moments. Then she turned towards Jack. ‘Carry him to the horse.’
Jack could see the determination in her eyes. She was no longer the woman who would accept what she was told with blind obedience. There was no fear left in her. She had seen too much to be frightened of a single man. The display was impressive, but he was still not risking both their lives for this wife-beater. There was another way.
‘Wait. Hold out your hands.’ He unbuckled the belt around his waist that carried his sabre and deposited it in her arms, then started to undo the buttons of his grey jacket. It was the jacket he had taken from Pinter all those months before. It had done its job, the officer’s insignia it bore giving him the freedom he had needed. Now it would serve another purpose.
‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’ He offered Martha a thin-lipped smile as he shrugged the jacket off. It did not take long to bend down and slide it over John’s shoulders. He took a moment to force John’s good arm into a sleeve and to wrap as much of the jacket around the man as he could.
‘There.’ He stood back and admired his handiwork. It would do.
‘Hey!’ He spotted an orderly on the far side of the tent. ‘There’s an officer here.’ His voice was full of authority. ‘Goddammit, man, why has Captain Joseph been left here?’
‘I’m sorry.’ The orderly walked towards them, half stumbling over a wounded soldier’s leg on the way. The man was clearly exhausted. He had likely been tending to the wounded since the battle had started the previous day. A night without sleep had left his wits fuddled. ‘I didn’t see him there. Officers are supposed to be in the other tent.’
‘I know where they are supposed to be, goddammit. I want Captain Joseph on the next ambulance, is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The orderly blinked hard as he looked at Jack, who was buckling his belt back around his waist. The lack of insignia clearly confused him, but the sabre made it obvious that the man shouting at him was no ordinary ranker.
‘If I come back and find him still here, I’ll be tearing you a new bloody arsehole, is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good.’ Jack glanced at Martha’s husband, who had his eyes closed and his head rested back against the tent pole. He understood the thought behind the act. Clearly John did not want his eyes to betray him as Martha left.
He reached out and pulled Martha towards him, keeping a firm hold on her arm. ‘Right, come on. High time we left. They’ll take care of him now. It’s better he stays with the doctors than that we drag him to God knows where.’
Martha took one last look at her husband, then nodded in agreement. They had secured John a place on the next ambulance. It was a better option for him than a desperate flight on the back of a horse.
‘John. I’ll find you, you hear me?’ she called out to him. ‘I’ll find you.’ She repeated the vow even as her husband failed to react to her words.
She said nothing more as Jack led her from the tent.
Jack and Martha had been riding for no more than a few minutes when they saw the first grey-coated men heading south. The sight brought Jack up short, and he stopped the mare and watched as the broken ranks of at least two Confederate regiments poured across the field he had been about to cross.
They were running hard in complete disorder. Even as he watched, he saw men discarding their equipment, the ground soon littered with knapsacks, ammunition pouches and even muskets. This was no ordered retreat. It was a rout.
The thunderous roar of a regimental volley ripped through the air. It sounded so close that he could not help flinching in expectation of coming under fire. This time no musket balls or rifle bullets stung the air around him, but it was clear that the Union army had to be close by.
‘What’s happening?’ Martha leaned forward and hissed the question directly into his ear.
‘I have no idea.’ Jack stood up in his stirrups, searching the ground as he tried to make sense of the situation he had ridden into. He saw nothing, his line of sight blocked in every direction. ‘Shit!’ The oath escaped his lips. Through a gap in some trees he caught a glimpse of a Union regiment advancing.
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‘What is it?’ Martha repeated.
‘It’s a fucking disaster.’ Jack felt the stirrings of fear. He did not linger to explain more. He turned the mare’s head, then kicked back his heels and forced the animal into a trot. He had wanted to find a road so that they could make fast progress with some notion of the direction in which they were headed. That was no longer an option; the Union counterattack had seen to that. It was time to ride away from the battle taking any route they could find.
He did his best to keep them away from the shattered ranks of the Confederate infantry. Yet it was not easy, the broken ground forcing him to move more slowly than he would have liked. An artillery shell roared by overhead, landing in the midst of the running men and sending up a great fountain of earth. Men screamed as fragments of red-hot shell casing ripped into them. They were left where they fell, the men around them callous and unfeeling. They thought only of flight and of saving their own lives.
More shells followed, ripping into the earth with shattering violence, each one killing and maiming indiscriminately.
Jack rode on, trying to ignore the knot of fear that was tying itself tighter and tighter deep in his gut. He pushed the mare hard, kicking it without mercy to force the pace.
He rode past a group of Confederate soldiers drawing breath behind a clump of trees. They carried Enfield rifles and were looking at one another for guidance. He was certain that an officer could get them to stand. They had fought long and hard, but he could see they were not yet done. With the right leadership, these well-armed men could still make a fight of it. He knew he could be the one to provide that leadership. It would be easy enough to stop his horse and shout the orders that would hold the men in place, the act likely summoning still more men to join them to hold their ground and perhaps even halt the retreat on this part of the line.
THE REBEL KILLER Page 33