Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Keep your aim low! Keep it low!” Sergeant Truslow shouted from the left flank.

  “Aim for the officers!” Captain Hinton, falling back with his skirmishers, shouted.

  Starbuck just stared. He could hear a northern officer shouting his men forward. “On, on, on!” The man had long red side-whiskers and gold-rimmed spectacles. “On! On!” Starbuck could now see the individual characters of the northern faces. The men’s mouths opened as they shouted, their eyes were wide. A man stumbled, almost dropped his rifle, then regained his balance. The attackers were past the first dead bodies left by the skirmishers. A gold-braided officer mounted on a gray horse dropped his sword to point it straight at the rebels. “Charge!” he shouted, and the attack line quickened into a stumbling run. The northerners were cheering as they came and the drummers lost all cohesion, simply beating their sticks in a frenzy of effort. A fallen color was picked up, its glorious silk stripes a dazzling patch of color in the gray smoke. “Charge!” the northern officer shouted again, and his horse pranced in the gunsmoke’s skeins.

  “Fire!” Major Bird screamed, then whooped with unfeigned glee as the Legion’s whole front disappeared in a gout of filthy smoke.

  The fusillade was like the crack of doom at the world’s end. It was one sudden, violent, horrifying volley at lethally short range and the shouts and drumming of the attacking northerners were wiped into instant silence, or rather transmuted into screams and shouts.

  “Reload!” Murphy shouted.

  Nothing could be seen through the bank of powder smoke that twisted above the rail fence. A few enemy bullets whipped through the smoke, but too high. The Legion reloaded, ramming their minié bullets hard down onto powder and wadding.

  “Forward!” Major Bird was shouting. “Take them forward! To the fence, to the fence!” He was jumping up and down with excitement and waving his unloaded revolver. “Forward! Forward!”

  Starbuck, still lost in a daze, began to load his revolver again. He was not sure why he did it, or whether he could ever use the weapon, but he just wanted to be doing something, and so he fumbled the powder and bullets into the Savage’s six chambers, then smeared the bullet cones with grease to seal each chamber and thus prevent the ignited powder in the firing chamber setting off the other charges. His hands still shook. In his mind’s eye he could still see that gorgeous banner, all shining red and white, being lifted from the blood-streaked grass to wave again in the sunlight.

  “Fire!” Sergeant Truslow shouted from the flank.

  “Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards!” That was Major Bird who, only an hour before, had been ridiculing the idea that he wanted to be involved in the day’s fighting.

  “Aim low! Aim at the bastards’ bellies!” That was Captain Murphy, who had abandoned his horse and was firing a rifle like his men. The smoke of the first volley thinned to show that the Yankee officer’s gray horse was down in the grass. There were bodies there, puffs of smoke, knots of men.

  Adam stayed back at the tree line with Starbuck. He was breathing hard, as though he had just run a race. One of Evans’s small smoothbore cannon fired a barrel of canister down the meadow. A northern shell whistled fragments above the Legion’s color party. A man reeled back from G Company, blood soaking his left shoulder. He leaned against a tree, breathing hard, and a bullet slapped into the trunk just above his head. The man cursed and pushed himself upright, then stumbled back toward the gun line. Adam, seeing the man’s resolve, pulled his revolver from his holster and urged his horse forward.

  “Adam!” Starbuck called, remembering his promise to Miriam Faulconer to keep Adam safe, but it was too late. Adam had taken his horse through the bank of bitter gunsmoke, over the fallen fence rails and into the smoke-free air where he was now calmly priming his revolver’s chambers with percussion caps in apparent oblivion of the bullets that whipcracked around him. Some of the Legion’s men shouted warnings that a man on a horse made a much choicer target than a foot soldier, but Adam ignored them.

  Instead he leveled the revolver and fired its full cylinder into the enemy’s bank of smoke. He looked almost happy. “Forward! Forward!” he shouted to no one in particular, but a dozen men of the Legion responded by advancing. They knelt close to Adam’s horse and fired blindly at the scattered enemy. The Legion’s first, overwhelming volley had torn the attackers into small groups of blue-uniformed men who stood in a crude line to exchange shots with the gray-clad southerners. The soldiers’ lips were stained by black powder from biting cartridges and their faces were wild with fear or with rage or with excitement. Adam, his revolver empty, was laughing. Everything was in chaos, nothing but a whirl of smoke and stabbing flame and men screaming defiance. A second line of attackers was advancing up the slope behind the ravaged enemy front line.

  “Forward!” Major Bird shouted, and groups of men darted a few paces forward, and the enemy edged a few paces backward. Starbuck had joined Adam and was spilling percussion caps from his right hand as he tried to prime the Savage’s six cones. Beside him a man knelt and fired, stood up and reloaded. The man was muttering swear words at the northerners, cursing their mothers and their children, cursing their past and all their short futures. A Rhode Island officer waved his sword, urging his men on, and a bullet thumped into his belly, bending him over. Sergeant Truslow, grim faced and silent, was loading his gun with buck and ball, a combination of a round bullet with three smaller buckshots that achieved something of a shotgun effect. He did not fire the charge blindly, but carefully sought a target then fired deliberately, making sure of his aim.

  “Go home! Go home!” Adam was shouting at the northerners, the apparently mild words made almost ludicrous by the note of excitement in his voice. He leveled his revolver again, pulled the trigger, but either he had misloaded or forgotten to prime the gun, for nothing happened, but he went on pulling the trigger as he screamed at the invaders to go home. Starbuck, beside his friend, seemed unable to shoot at the flag he had known all his life.

  “Come on, boys! Come on!” The shout came from the far right of the Confederate line where Starbuck saw the gaudily uniformed Louisiana Zouaves charging out of the powder smoke to carry their bayonet-tipped rifles at the enemy. Some of the Louisianans whirled bowie knives as huge as cutlasses. They advanced raggedly, screaming a terrible high-pitched scream that made Starbuck’s blood run cold. My God, he thought, but the Zouaves would all be cut down, shot in the open field, but instead the northerners edged back and still farther back, and suddenly the Louisiana infantry were among the blue-coated skirmishers and the northerners were running for their lives. A bowie knife sliced round and a man fell with his skull streaming blood. Another northern skirmisher was pinned to the ground with a bayonet as the whole center of the federal attack line stumbled backward from the bloody Zouave attack, then the rearward movement became a sudden rout as the northerners fled to avoid the heavy blades. But there was only a handful of Louisiana infantry, and their flanks were open to fire, and suddenly a northern volley smashed into their ranks. Colonel Wheat went down, his baggy red shirt soaked with blood.

  The Louisianans, hugely outnumbered, came to a halt as their enemies’ bullets drove into them. Their gaudy bodies twitched as the bullets struck, but their mad charge had hurled the heart of the Yankee line a good hundred paces back down the hill. But now it was the Zouaves’ turn to go backward and to carry their wounded Colonel toward the trees.

  “Fire!” a southern artilleryman shouted and one of the smoothbore cannons belched a belly of canister at the northerners.

  “Fire!” Major Bird shouted, and a score of Legion rifles crashed smoke and flame. A boy from Company D rammed a bullet onto a barrel already crammed with three charges of powder and bullets. He pulled the trigger, did not seem to notice that the gun had not fired, and started loading the musket yet again.

  “Fire!” Nathan Evans screamed, and the South Carolinians smashed a volley across the fence, and in the pastureland the Rhode Islanders shuffled back
to leave their dead and wounded bleeding in the grass.

  “Fire!” A Louisiana chaplain, his Bible forgotten, emptied his revolver at the Yankees, pulling the trigger until the hammer fell on empty chambers, yet still he went on pulling, his face a rictus of exaltation.

  “Fire!” Truslow shouted at his men. A sixteen-year-old screamed when a cartridge load of powder exploded in his face as he poured it into the hot barrel of his rifle. Robert Decker fired a shotgun into the smoke cloud. The grass of the meadow was flickering with small fires started by the burning wads from the rifle barrels. An injured man crawled back toward the tree line, attempted to clamber over the clutter of fallen fence rails, and there collapsed. His body seemed to shiver, then was still. An officer’s horse lay dead, its body shuddering as northern bullets thudded home, but the Yankee fire was sporadic as the Rhode Islanders, too frightened to stand still and reload properly, stepped backward. The rebels screamed defiance and spat bullets into hot barrels, rammed the charges hard home, pulled their triggers, then started the process again. Starbuck watched the Legion fight its first battle and was struck by the atmosphere of glee, of sheer release, of carnival enjoyment. Even their soldiers’ screams sounded to Starbuck like the mad whoops of overexcited children. Groups of men were darting forward, emulating the Zouaves’ charge, and driving the demoralized Rhode Islanders farther back down the long slope where the first Yankee charge had been stopped cold.

  Yet a second Yankee attack line was already halfway up the slope and still more northern troops were coming from the Sudley Road. A U.S. Marine regiment was there, together with three fresh regiments of New York volunteers. More field guns appeared, and the first Yankee cavalry galloped off to the left of their line as the fresh northern infantry marched stoically into the open land to reinforce the ragged remnants of the first attack, which had retreated two hundred paces back from the litter of bodies and the line of slick bloody grass and scorched turf that marked the high-tide line of their first failed assault.

  “Form line! Form line!” The shout started somewhere in the center of the Confederate formation, and somehow enough sane officers and sergeants heard the order and echoed it, and slowly the screaming, maddened rebels were brought back to the fence line. They were grinning and laughing, full of pride for what they had done. Every now and then a man would whoop for no apparent reason, or else a man might turn around to blast a bullet at the stalled northern attack. Insults were hurled down the long slope.

  “Go back to your mothers, Yankees!”

  “Send some real men next time!”

  “So how do you like a Virginia welcome, you yellow bastards!”

  “Silence!” Major Bird shouted. “Silence!”

  Someone began laughing, a hysterical mad laugh. Someone else cheered. At the foot of the slope the northern guns opened fire again, screaming their shells up to the ridge to blast apart in dark-flamed smoke. The short-barreled northern howitzers had never ceased to fire, lobbing spherical case shot high over the Rhode Islanders and New Yorkers to crash raggedly about the edge of the woods.

  “Back to the trees! Back to the trees!” The order was repeated down the rebel line and the southerners retreated back into the shadows. In front of them, where the powder smoke cleared slowly from the burnt grass, a handful of bodies lay on either side of the remnants of rail fence while beyond the fence, in the brighter sunlight, a scattering of dead northerners was sprawled in the pasture. The officer with red side-whiskers lay there with his mouth open and his gold-rimmed spectacles half-fallen off his face. A crow flapped down to land near the man’s body. A wounded northerner pulled himself toward the trees, asking for water, but no one in the Legion had any water. They had emptied their canteens and now the sun was beating hotter and their mouths were dried by the saltpeter in the gunpowder, but there was no water, and ahead of them were yet more Yankees coming from the far trees to reignite the attack.

  “We’ll do it to them again, boys! We’ll do it to them again,” Major Bird shouted, and even though the chaos of the Legion’s first fight had not given him a chance to fully test his theory of musketry, he suddenly knew he had achieved something far more valuable; he had discovered an activity he utterly enjoyed. For all of his adult life Thaddeus Bird had been faced with the classic dilemma of a poor relation, which was whether to show an eternal deferential gratitude or to demonstrate an independency of mind by cultivating a prickly opposition to every prevailing orthodoxy, which latter course had pleased Bird until, in the smoke and excitement of battle, there had been no need to posture. Now he paced behind his men, watching the new northern attack take shape and felt strangely content. “Load your guns,” he called in a firm voice, “but hold your fire! Load your guns, but hold your fire.”

  “Go for their bellies, boys,” Murphy called aloud. “Put them down hard and the rest will go home.”

  Adam, like his uncle, also felt as though a great weight had gone from his soul. The awful noise of the battle spelt the death of all that he had worked for in the months since Lincoln’s election, but the terrible sound also meant that Adam was no longer concerned with the great issues of war and peace, of slavery and emancipation, of states’ rights and Christian principle, but only with being a good neighbor to the men who had volunteered to serve his father. Adam even began to understand his father, who had never agonized over morality or wanted to weigh up the balance of his actions in an earnest attempt to guarantee a favorable verdict on the Day of Judgment. Once, when Adam had asked his father about the principles by which he lived his life, Washington Faulconer had simply laughed the question away. “You know your trouble? You think too much. I’ve never known a happy man who thought too much. Thinking just complicates affairs. Life’s like jumping a bad fence on a good horse, the more responsibility you leave to the horse the safer you’ll be, and the more you leave to life the happier you are. Worrying about principles is schoolmaster’s talk. You’ll just find you sleep better if you treat people naturally. It ain’t principle, just practicality. I never could stand listening to cant about principle. Just be yourself!” And Adam, in the sudden splintering chaos of a firefight, had at last trusted the horse to take the jump, and discovered that all his agony of conscience had evaporated in the simple pleasure of doing his duty. Adam, in a meadow whipsawed by fire, had behaved well. He might have lost the battle for his country, but he had won the war in his soul.

  “Load your guns! Hold your fire!” Major Bird walked slowly behind the Legion’s companies, watching the Yankee horde gather for its next attempt. “Shoot low when they come, boys, shoot low! And well done, all of you, well done.”

  The Legion, in just five minutes, had become soldiers.

  “Hey, you!” The voice shouted at Ethan Ridley from the top of the central wig-wag tower. “You! Yes, you! Are you a staff officer?”

  Ridley, who had been lost in thought as he galloped his horse southward, reined in. Ridley suspected that being one of Washington Faulconer’s aides was not what the signal officer meant by a staff officer, but Ridley was quick witted enough to realize he needed some excuse to be galloping alone in the rear areas of the Confederate army and so he shouted the affirmative. “Yes!”

  “Can you find General Beauregard?” The speaker, an officer wearing captain’s bars, clambered down the makeshift ladder. A hand-lettered sign at the foot of the ladder read “Signalers ONLY” while another, in even larger letters, read “KEEP OFF.” The officer ran across to Ridley and held up a folded sheet of paper secured by a wafer seal. “Beauregard needs that quick.”

  “But…” Ridley had been about to say he had no idea how to find General Beauregard, but then decided such a disclaimer would sound odd from a self-proclaimed staff officer. Besides, Ridley reckoned that Colonel Faulconer would be wherever the general was, so by finding the Colonel he would also discover Beauregard.

  “I have wig-wagged the message to Beauregard, if that’s what you’re about to suggest,” the captain said peevishly, “but I’d
like to send a written confirmation. You can never be certain a message gets wig-wagged through, not with the fools they give me to work with. I need good men, educated men. I wish you’d make that point to Beauregard for me. With my respects, of course. Half the lunkheads they provide me never learned to spell, and the other half didn’t have brains to begin with. Now go on with you, there’s a good fellow, quick as you can!”

  Ridley kicked back his heels. He was in the army’s baggage area where wagons, limbers, portable forges, ambulances and carriages were parked so tightly that their upturned shafts looked like a winter thicket. A woman shouted as Ridley galloped past, wanting to know what was happening, but he just shook his head and spurred on past cooking fires, past groups of men playing cards and past a child playing with a kitten. What were all these people doing here? he wondered.

  He breasted a rise and saw the smoke of battle lying like a river fog in the Bull Run valley to his left. That fog, where the great guns slammed their missiles across the stream, lay around the center and left of the rebel army, while in front of Ridley was the tangle of woods and small pastures that was the Confederate right wing and from where General Beauregard hoped to launch his own attack on the unsuspecting northerners. Colonel Washington Faulconer was somewhere in that tangle and Ridley rested his horse while he tried to make some sense of the landscape. He was tense and angry, fidgeting in his saddle, aware of the enormity of the gamble he was taking, but Ridley would take almost any gamble to fulfill his ambitions. For weeks now Ethan Ridley had played fast and loose with Washington Faulconer’s money, but now, as the Legion divided along a line that separated the Colonel’s admirers from those who despised him, Ridley would make his choice. He would side whole-heartedly with the Colonel and defeat Starbuck and Bird who, aided by Adam’s pusillanimity, had forced the Legion to abandon its obedience to Faulconer.