Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “It is not permitted,” James responded curtly.

  “Ain’t it a free country, Cap’n?”

  “It is not permitted,” James insisted in the authoritative voice that always proved so effective in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Court of Common Pleas, but which merely seemed to amuse these newspapermen. The civilians accompanying James were reporters and sketch artists from a dozen northern papers who had come to Brigadier General McDowell’s headquarters the previous night and had been told to attach themselves to the general’s sous-adjutant. James already had the responsibility of escorting a half-dozen foreign military attachés who had ridden from their countries’ Washington embassies and who were now treating the impending battle as though it were a fine entertainment laid on for their benefit, but at least the foreign military officers treated James with respect while the newspapermen merely seemed to aggravate him.

  “What in hell’s name is a sows-adjutant?” a reporter from Harper’s Weekly had asked James in the raw small hours after midnight when, all around them, the northern army had been stirring itself ready for its march into battle. “A kind of Indian fighter?”

  “Sous is French for ‘under.’” James suspected that the newspaperman who came from the self-proclaimed “Journal of Civilization” knew full well what sous meant.

  “Does that mean you’re a kind of inferior adjutant, Cap’n?”

  “It means I am an assistant to the adjutant.” James had managed to keep his temper, despite feeling distinctly out of sorts. He had managed but two hours sleep and had woken to a sharp attack of flatulence that he acknowledged to be entirely his own fault. Brigadier General McDowell was a famous trencherman who had last night encouraged his staff to eat well, and James, despite his conviction that ample nourishment was necessary for both spiritual and bodily health, wondered if a third helping of the general’s beef pie had been a plateful too much. Then there had also been the hotcakes and custard, all consumed with the teetotal general’s well-sugared lemonade. Such indulgence would not have mattered if James had been able to take a spoonful of his mother’s carminative balsam before retiring, but his fool of a servant had forgotten to put James’s medicine chest into the headquarter’s baggage wagons and so James had been forced to field the inquisitive reporters’ questions and, at the same time, hide the exquisite discomfort of a severe attack of indigestion.

  The newspapermen, meeting James in the farmhouse at Centreville where he had spent his uncomfortable night, had demanded to know McDowell’s intentions, and James had explained, as simply as he could, that the general envisaged nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the rebellion. An hour’s march to the south of the Bull Run stream was the small town of Manassas Junction and, once that town was captured, the rail line that linked the two rebel armies in Northern Virginia would be severed. General Johnston could no longer come from the Shenandoah Valley to support Beauregard, so Beauregard’s defeated rebel army, cut off from that reinforcement, must retreat to Richmond and there be captured. The war would then peter out as the scattered rebel forces were either defeated or gave up. James had made it all sound very predictable and rather obvious.

  “But the rebels gave us a whipping four days ago. Doesn’t that worry you?” one of the newspapermen had asked. He was referring to a large northern reconnaissance force that had approached the Bull Run four days before and, in an excess of zeal, had tried to cross the stream, but had instead provoked a withering and deadly hail of bullets from the rebels concealed among the thick foliage on the farther bank. James dismissed the repulse as trivial, and had even tried to gloss it with a coat of victory by suggesting that the accidental contact with the enemy had been designed to convince the rebels that any northern attack would fall in the same place, on their right flank, when in fact the real assault would hook deep around the Confederate left.

  “So what’s the worst that could happen today, Captain?” another of the newspapermen had wanted to know.

  The worst, James conceded, was that General Johnston’s forces might have left the Shenandoah Valley and be on their way to reinforce Beauregard’s men. That, he admitted, would make the day’s fighting much harder, but he could assure the newspapermen that the latest telegraph news from the northern forces in the Shenandoah was that Johnston was still in the valley.

  “But if Joe Johnston’s rebs do join up with Beauregard’s,” the newspaperman insisted, “does that mean we’re whipped?”

  “It means we must work somewhat harder to defeat them.” James felt annoyed by the tone of the question, but calmly reiterated his assurance that Johnston was still trapped far to the west, which meant that the great issue of American unity must this day be decided by the men presently gathered either side of the Bull Run. “And it will be a victory,” James had confidently predicted. He had taken repeated pains to tell the newspapermen that this northern army was the largest force of troops ever assembled in North America. Irvin McDowell led more than thirty thousand men, over twice as many as George Washington’s army at Yorktown. It was, James assured the journalists, an overpowering force and proof of the federal government’s resolve to crush the rebellion swiftly and absolutely.

  The reporters had pounced on the word overpowering. “You mean we outnumber the rebs, Captain?”

  “Not outnumber, exactly.” In fact no one knew just how many men the rebels had mustered on the Bull Run’s farther bank, the estimates ranging from ten thousand to a most unlikely forty thousand, but James did not want to make the northern victory sound like an inevitability brought about by sheer numbers. There had to be some room for northern heroism, and so he had hedged his answer. “We think,” he said grandly, “that the rebels can muster numbers not unlike our own, but in this battle, gentlemen, it will be training, morale and justice that shall prevail.”

  And justice would prevail, James still believed, not just to capture a rural railhead, but rather to so defeat and so demoralize the Confederate forces that the victorious northern troops could march unobstructed on to the rebel capital, which lay a mere hundred miles south. “On to Richmond!” the northern newspapers cried, and “On to Richmond!” was sewn in bright cloth letters on the standards of some federal regiments, and “On to Richmond!” the spectators had called to the troops marching across the Long Bridge out of Washington. Some of those spectators had done more than watch the troops leave, but had actually accompanied the army into Virginia. Indeed it seemed to James as though half of Washington’s polite society had come to witness the great northern victory for, as the sun now rose above the Bull Run, he could see scores of civilian spectators already mingling with the federal troops. There were elegant carriages parked among the gun limbers, and artists’ easels and sketch pads standing amidst the stacks of rifles and muskets. Fashionable ladies sheltered under parasols, servants laid out rugs and picnic hampers, while self-important congressmen, eager to share if not wholly capture the glory of the hour, pontificated to whomever might listen on the army’s strategy.

  “You reckon we’ll make Richmond by Saturday?” the Harper’s Weekly reporter now asked James Starbuck.

  “We devoutly hope so.”

  “And we’ll hang Jefferson Davis on Sunday,” the reporter said, then gave a whoop of glee at that happy prospect.

  “Not on Sunday, I think.” James was too much of a lawyer to let such a careless remark go unchallenged, especially in front of the foreign military attachés, who might conclude from the reporter’s words that the United States was not only a nation of Sabbath breakers, but also a pack of uncivilized roughs who did not understand the need for strict legality. “We’ll hang Davis after due process,” James said for the benefit of those foreigners, “and only after due process.”

  “The Captain means we’ll tie a good knot in the rope first,” one of the reporters helpfully explained to the military attachés.

  James dutifully smiled, though in truth he found the ways of these newspapermen shockingly dishonest. Many of th
ese journalists had already written their accounts of this day’s battle, using their imaginations to describe how the cowardly troops of the slave masters had fled at the first sight of the Stars and Stripes, and how other rebel soldiers had fallen penitent to their knees rather than open fire on the glorious old flag. Northern cavalry had trampled their hooves red in the slavocracy’s gore and northern bayonets had become sticky with southern blood. James might be shocked by the dishonesty, but as the stories merely reported an outcome for which he most earnestly prayed, he did not feel comfortable in expressing reproof lest he should be considered defeatist. Defeat, after all, was unthinkable, for this was the day when the rebellion must be broken and the race to Richmond could begin.

  There was a sudden flurry at the foot of the hill as the artillery horses were freed from their gun and limber traces. The guns had been placed behind a snake-rail fence and were aimed toward a handsome stone bridge that carried the turnpike over the stream. The bridge was the key to Brigadier General McDowell’s hopes for, by persuading the rebels that his main attack would be an assault straight down the turnpike, he hoped to draw their forces forward in the bridge’s defense while his secret flanking column curled about their rear. Other northern troops would demonstrate against the enemy’s right wing, but the vital achievement was to hold the rebel left wing hard up against the stone bridge so that the northern flank attack would sweep unopposed and undetected into the Confederate rear. The rebels had thus to be deceived into believing that the feigned attack on the bridge was the main attack of the day, and to add verisimilitude to that deception a massive piece of artillery had been brought forward to open the fake assault.

  That artillery piece was a thirty-pounder Parrott rifle with an iron barrel more than eleven feet long and weighing nearly two tons. The gun’s metal-rimmed wheels stood as high as a man’s shoulders, and the huge weapon had needed nineteen horses to drag it forward during the last hours of darkness. Indeed its slow progress had held up the advance of the whole federal army, and some northern officers thought it madness to maneuver such a giant piece of fortress artillery into the army’s forwardmost positions, but every soldier who saw the cumbersome gun roll ponderously past in the first light of dawn reckoned that the beast would be a battle winner all by itself. The bore of the rifled barrel was over four inches across, while its iron-banded black breech was now crammed with nearly four pounds of black powder onto which a conical shell had been rammed. The shell was filled with black powder and was designed to burst apart in a killing explosion of flame and shattering iron that would tear and splinter and flense the rebels on the Bull Run’s far bank, though presently the dawn’s early light was hardly revealing much in the way of targets on that rebel side of the stream. Once in a while a Confederate officer spurred a horse across a distant field, and some few infantrymen were scattered on a hill that lay at least a mile beyond the stone bridge, but otherwise there was small evidence that the rebels were present in any force.

  A friction primer was shoved through the Parrott’s touchhole and deep into the canvas bag of black powder. The primer was a copper tube filled with finely mealed gunpowder. The topmost section of the tube held a small charge of fulminate and was pierced by a serrated metal crosspiece, which when pulled hard by its lanyard would scrape violently across the fulminate and, just like a match head scratched by a file, would detonate the fulminate with friction. A gunner sergeant now grabbed the lanyard’s free end while the other crew members stood well clear of the weapon’s lethal recoil.

  “Ready!” the gunner sergeant called. Some of the crewmen from the other guns in the battery had assembled in a small group to listen to a Bible reading and to say a prayer, but all now turned toward the giant Parrott rifle and covered their ears.

  A mounted artillery officer consulted his watch. In the years to come he wanted to tell his children and grandchildren the exact moment at which his great gun had signaled the beginning of the rebellion’s end. By his watch it was just approaching eighteen minutes past five in the morning, a mere twelve minutes since the sun had first burst its brilliance across the eastern horizon. The artillery officer, a lieutenant, had entered that moment of sunrise in his diary, though he had also meticulously noted that his watch was liable to gain or lose five minutes in any one day, depending on the temperature.

  “Ready!” the gunner sergeant called again, this time with a touch of impatience in his voice.

  The artillery lieutenant waited till the watch’s hand exactly pointed to the speck that marked the eighteenth minute, then dropped his right hand. “Fire!”

  The sergeant snatched the lanyard and the small crosspiece scraped violently across the fulminate. Fire flashed down the copper tube and the powder bag ignited to hurl the shell forward. The base of the shell was a cup of soft brass that expanded to grip the Parrott gun’s rifled barrel and start the shell spinning.

  The noise exploded violently across the landscape, startling birds up from the trees and thumping the eardrums of the thousands of men who waited for the orders to advance. The gun itself was hurled backward, its trail gouging the soil and its wheels bouncing a clear eighteen inches up from the ground and coming to rest a full seven feet back from where the gun had been fired. In front of the fuming barrel was a scorched patch of turf beneath a roiling cloud of dirty white smoke. Onlookers who had never heard a great gun fired gasped at the sheer fury of the sound, at the appalling crack of the cannon’s firing, which promised a horrid destruction on the far side of the stream.

  The crew was already feeding the monster’s smoking maw with a soaking sponge that would douse the remnants of fire deep in the barrel before the next bag of gunpowder was rammed into the muzzle. Meanwhile the first shell screamed across the meadows, flashed above the bridge, crashed through the wood in a splinter of shattering twigs, then spun hard into the empty hillside beyond the trees. Inside the shell was an ordinary rifle’s percussion cap that was fixed to the front of a heavy metal rod which, when the missile struck the hillside, was thrown violently forward to strike against an iron anvil plate in the shell’s nose. The copper percussion cap was filled with a fulminate of mercury that was unstable enough to explode under such sudden pressure and which thus ignited the gunpowder crammed into the shell’s casing, but the missile had already buried itself three feet into the soft ground and the explosion did little more than quake a few square paces of empty hillside and gout a sudden vent of smoky earth from the riven grass.

  “Six and a half seconds.” The mounted artillery officer noted the flight time of the shell aloud, then entered the figure into his notebook.

  “You may report that the battle proper began at twenty-one minutes past five,” James Starbuck announced. His ears were still ringing from the violence of the cannon’s report and his horse’s ears were still pricked nervously forward.

  “I make it only a quarter past five,” the Harper’s Weekly man said.

  “Eighteen minutes past?” The speaker was a French military attaché, one of the half-dozen foreign officers who were observing the battle with Captain James Starbuck.

  “Too damned early, whatever the time,” one of the newspapermen yawned.

  James Starbuck frowned at the oath, then flinched as the heavy gun crashed its second shot toward the stone bridge. The percussive sound of the gun’s firing thumped across the green countryside and seemed far more impressive than any effect the shell was having on the distant landscape. James desperately wanted to see havoc and maelstrom beyond the stream. He had thought when he had first seen the huge Parrott that a single shell fired from so massive a weapon might serve to panic the rebels, but alas, everything beyond the stream looked oddly calm, and James feared that lack of carnage might seem ridiculous to these foreign soldiers who had all served in Europe’s wars and who, James thought, might therefore be supercilious about these amateurish American efforts.

  “A very impressive weapon, Captain.” The French attaché soothed all James’s worries with the ge
nerous remark.

  “Entirely manufactured in America, Colonel, at our West Point foundry in Cold Spring, New York, and designed by the foundry’s superintendent, Mister Robert Parrott.” James thought he heard one of the newspapermen making a birdlike noise behind him, but managed to ignore the sound. “The gun can fire common shell, case shot, and bolts. It has a range of two thousand two hundred yards at five degrees of elevation.” Much of James’s service had so far consisted of learning just such details so he could keep foreign attachés properly informed. “We would of course be happy to arrange an escorted tour of the foundry for you.”

  “Ah! So.” The Frenchman, a colonel called Lassan, had one eye, a horribly scarred face, and a magnificently ornate uniform. He watched as the huge gun fired a third time, then nodded his approval as the rest of the federal artillery, which had been waiting for the third shot as their signal, opened fire in unison. The green fields to the east of the stream blossomed with smoke as gun after gun crashed back on its trail. A teamhorse, inadequately picketed, bolted in panic from the sky-battering noise, dispersing a group of black-berrying infantrymen behind the gun line. “I never enjoyed artillery fire,” Colonel Lassan remarked mildly, then touched a nicotine-stained finger to the patch over his missing eye. “This went to a Russian shell.”

  “We trust the rebels are sharing your distaste, sir,” James said with heavy humor. The strike of the gunshots was now visible beyond the stream where trees shook from the impact of shells and the soil of the farther hillsides was being flecked by ricocheting and exploding missiles. James had to raise his voice to be heard above the loud cannonade. “Once the flanking column reveals itself, sir, I think we can anticipate swift victory.”

  “Ah, indeed?” Lassan enquired politely, then leaned forward to pat his horse’s neck.

  “Two bucks says we’ll have the bastards on the skedaddle by ten o’clock,” a reporter from the Chicago Tribune offered the assembled company, though no one took up the wager. A Spanish colonel, magnificent in a red and white dragoon’s uniform, unscrewed the cap from a flask and sipped whiskey.