Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  And thus the day’s real dying had begun.

  It began because a battle of motion, of outflanking, advance and retreat, had become a standoff fight. The hilltop was bare of trees, devoid of ditch or wall, just an open space for death, and death grasped at it greedily. Men loaded and fired, fell and bled, cursed and died, and still more men filed onto the plateau to extend death’s grip. Twin lines of infantry were stalled just a hundred paces apart and there tried to blast the guts out of each other. Men from New York and New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, Connecticut and Massachusetts shot at men from Mississippi and Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, Maryland and Tennessee. The wounded crawled back to collapse in the grass, the dead were hurled aside, the files closed on the center, the regiments shrank, yet still the firing went on beneath the bright flags. The northerners, firing again and again at the Confederate lines, knew that they only needed to break this small army, capture Richmond, and the whole conceit of a Southern Confederacy would collapse like a rotten pumpkin, while the southerners, returning bullet for bullet, knew that the North, once bloodied, would think twice before they dared invade the sovereign and sacred soil of the South again.

  And so, for their twin causes, men fought beneath the colors, though, in the windless heat, the real trophies of the day were the opposing guns, for the side that could silence their enemy’s guns was the side likeliest to win the struggle. None of the guns was emplaced behind earthworks, for none of the generals had planned to fight on this bare plateau, and so the gunners were vulnerable to infantry fire because there was not room on the hilltop for men to stand off at a distance. This was a belly-to-belly brawl, a murderous gutter fight.

  Men charged at open guns, and the guns, crammed with lethal canister, left swaths of attackers dead in front of their muzzles, yet still the men charged. Then, as the sun passed its dazzling height, a Virginia regiment dressed in blue coats, which had been the only uniforms available to their colonel, came to reinforce the Confederate left and saw a northern battery in front of them. They marched forward. The gunners saw them and waved at them, believing them to be northerners, and in the still, hot smoky air the triple stripes of the Confederate flag hung red, white and blue like the Stars and Stripes. The northern gunners, stripped to their waists and sweating white stripes through powder stains and cursing as they burned their hands on the blazing hot barrels of their guns, did not give a second glance to the blue-coated infantry that marched, as the gunners supposed, to give them support against the infantry in front.

  “Take aim!” A whole battalion of Virginia infantry had come to close pistol range on the flank of a northern battery. The rifle muskets went onto blue-uniformed shoulders. There was no time to turn the field guns and so the gunners threw themselves flat, wriggled under their guns and limbers, then covered their heads with their arms.

  “Fire!” The flames ripped through the gray smoke and the Virginian officers heard the rattle as hundreds of musket balls beat home on iron gun barrels or wooden limber boxes, and then they heard the screams as forty-nine of the fifty battery horses died. The gunners who had survived the volley turned and fled as the Virginians charged with fixed bayonets and bowie knives. The battery was captured, its guns splashed with blood.

  “Turn the guns! Turn the guns!”

  “Charge!” More southerners ran forward, bayonets bright in the smoky gloom. “Our homes! Our homes!” they called, and a crash of musketry greeted them, but the northerners here were falling back. A shell exploded somewhere between the lines, streaking the smoke with flame. “Our homes!”

  The northerners counterattacked. A regiment swept over the captured guns, forcing the Virginians back, but the recaptured guns were of no use to the federals for the gunners had been shot or else slaughtered by bayonets, and the horse teams were so much dead meat, so the cannon could not even be taken away. Other gunners in other batteries were killed by sharpshooters, and slowly the Confederates edged forward and the northerners heard the strange wailing scream as the rebel line attacked. The shadows lengthened and still more men climbed the hill to enter the stubborn horror.

  James Starbuck came to the hilltop. He no longer searched for trophies that his victorious general could lay before the president’s feet. Instead he came to discover just what had gone wrong on the smoke-wreathed plateau. “Tell me what’s happening, Starbuck,” Irvin McDowell had ordered his aide. “Off you go!” McDowell had sent six other men on similar errands, but had not thought to visit the plateau himself. In truth McDowell was swamped by the noise and the uncertainty and simply wanted an aide to come back with good news of victory.

  James urged his horse up the shell-scarred hillside to where he found hell. His horse, devoid of guidance, ambled slowly forward to where a New York regiment, newly ordered to the hilltop, marched with fixed bayonets toward the enemy line, and it seemed to James that the whole southern army suddenly flowered in flame, a great fence of flame which turned to a rolling bank of smoke, and the New Yorkers just shuddered to a stop, and then another southern volley came from their flank and the New Yorkers stepped backward, leaving their dead and dying, and James saw the ramrods working as the men tried to return the fire, but the New York regiment had attacked alone, without flank support, and they had no chance against the southern volleys that enfiladed and confronted and decimated them. James tried to cheer them on, but his mouth was too dry to make words.

  Then James’s world obliterated itself. His horse literally jumped beneath him, then reared up its head to scream as it collapsed. A southern shell had exploded dead under its belly, eviscerating the beast and James, stunned, deafened and screaming for help, sprawled clumsily off the collapsing mass of guts and blood and flesh and hooves. He scrambled away on all fours, suddenly throwing up the contents of his distended belly. He stayed on all fours, retching foully, then managed to stagger to his feet. He slipped in a puddle of his horse’s blood, then stood again and staggered toward the wooden house that lay at the center of the federal battle line and seemed to offer a kind of refuge, though, as he got closer, he saw how the little building had been splintered and riven and scorched by bullets and shells. James leaned on the springhouse in the yard and tried to make sense of his world, but all he could think about was the welter of horse’s blood into which he had fallen. His ears still rang from the explosion.

  A Wisconsin soldier, his face a mask of white, was sitting beside him, and James slowly became aware that the man’s head was half-severed by a shell fragment and his brains exposed. “No,” James said, “no!” Inside the house a woman was wailing while somewhere in the distance it sounded as though a whole army of women was wailing. James pushed away the springhouse and staggered toward a regiment of infantry. They were Massachusetts men, his own people, and he stood close beside their colors and saw the heap of dead that had been thrown up behind the flags, and even as he watched, another man crumpled down. The flags were a target for enemy marksmen, a bright-starred invitation to death, but as soon as the color bearer fell another man plucked up the staff and held the standards high.

  “Starbuck!” a voice shouted. It was a major whom James knew as a dour and canny attorney in Boston, but for some reason, although James must have met the man every week at the Lawyer’s Club, he could not place his name. “Where’s McDowell?” the major shouted.

  “Down by the turnpike.” James managed to sound reasonably coherent.

  “He should be here!” A shell screamed overhead. The major, a thin and gray-haired man with a neatly clipped beard, shuddered as the missile exploded somewhere behind. “Damn them!”

  Damn who, James wondered, then was astonished that he had used the swear word, even silently in his thoughts.

  “We’re fighting them piecemeal!” The Boston attorney tried to explain the northern army’s predicament. “It won’t do!”

  “What do you mean?” James had to shout to make himself heard over the constant crash of gunnery. What was this man’s name? He remembered how the atto
rney was a terrier in cross-examination, never letting go of a witness till he had shaken the evidence free, and James remembered how, famously, the man had once lost his temper with Chief Justice Shaw, complaining in open court that Shaw was intellectually and judicially costive, for which contempt Shaw had first fined him, and had then purchased him supper. What was the man’s name?

  “The attacks should coincide! We need a general officer to coordinate affairs.” The major stopped abruptly.

  James, who was always made uncomfortable by criticism of constituted authority, tried to explain that General McDowell was undoubtedly aware of what was happening, but then he stopped talking because the major was swaying. James put out a hand, the major gripped it with a demonic force, and then opened his mouth, but instead of speaking he just voided a great flow of blood. “Oh, no,” the major managed to say, then he slumped down to James’s feet. James felt himself shaking. This was a nightmare, and he felt most terrible, abject and shameful fear. “Tell my dear Abigail,” the dying major said, and he looked pathetically up at James, and James still could not remember the man’s name.

  “Tell Abigail what?” he asked stupidly, but the Major was dead, and James shook the corpse’s hand away and felt a terrible, terrible sadness that he was going to die without ever knowing the pleasures of this world. He would die and there was no one who would really miss him, no one who would truly mourn him, and James stared at the sky and howled a self-pitying cry, then he managed to fumble his revolver from its stiff-leather holster and he aimed it vaguely in the direction of the Confederate army and pulled its trigger time and again to spit its bullets into a smoke cloud. Each single shot was a protest and a revenge for his own cautious nature.

  The Massachusetts regiment stumbled forward. They were no longer in line but had coalesced into small groups of men that now sidled between the dead and dying. They talked to one another as they fought, cheering one another on, offering praise and small jests. “Hey, reb! Here’s a lead pill for your sickness!” a man shouted, then fired.

  “You all right, Billy?”

  “Gun’s all choked up.” The minié bullets expanded in the barrels as their hollowed-out backs were swollen by the powder gases to grip the rifling and so give the missile a deadly accurate spin. The friction of the expanded bullet scraping through the barrel was supposed to clean the fouled powder deposits from the rifling, but the theory did not work and the harsh deposits still accreted to make the guns terribly hard for a tired man to load.

  “Here, reb! Here’s one for you!”

  “Christ! That was close.”

  “No use ducking, Robby, they’ve gone past before you hear ’em.”

  “Anyone got a shot? Someone give me a cartridge!”

  James took comfort from the quiet words and edged closer to the nearest group of men. The commanding officer of the Massachusetts regiment had started the day as a lieutenant and now shouted at the survivors to advance, and so they tried, shouting a harsh defiance from their raw throats, but then two Confederate six pounders took the regiment’s open flank with barrel loads of canister and the musket balls whipped along the survivors, decimating their groups and bloodying the slippery turf with still more blood. The Massachusetts men stepped back. James reloaded his revolver. He was close enough to see the dirty faces of the enemy, to see their eyes showing white through the powder stains on their skin, to see their unbuttoned coats and loose shirts. He saw a rebel fall down, clutching at his knee, then crawl away to the rear. He saw a rebel officer with long fair mustaches screaming encouragement at his men. The man’s coat hung open and his trousers were belted with a length of rope. James took careful aim at the man, fired, but his revolver’s smoke obscured the effect of his shot.

  The rebel guns crashed back, bucking on their trails, smashing down on their wheels, sizzling as the sponges cleaned out their barrels, then firing again to feed the cloud of smoke that thickened like a Nantucket fog. More guns came from Beauregard’s right wing. The rebel general sensed that disaster had been averted though it was none of his doing, but rather because his farmhands and college boys and store clerks had withstood the northern assault and were now counterattacking everywhere along Jackson’s makeshift line. Two amateur armies had collided and luck was running Beauregard’s way.

  General Joseph Johnston had brought his men from the Shenandoah Valley, but, now that they were here, he had no duties except to watch them die. Johnston outranked Beauregard, but Beauregard had planned this battle, knew the ground, while Johnston was a stranger, and so he was letting Beauregard finish the fight. Johnston was ready to take over if Beauregard were hit, but till then he would stay silent and just try to understand the flux of the huge event that had come to its terrible climax on the hilltop. Johnston understood clearly enough that the North had wrong-footed Beauregard and turned his flank, but he also saw how the southern forces were fighting back hard and could yet scrape through to victory. Johnston also understood that it was Colonel Nathan Evans, the unregarded South Carolinian, who had probably saved the Confederacy by planting his feeble force across the path of the northern flank attack. Johnston sought out Evans and thanked him, then, working his way back to the east, the general came to where the wounded Washington Faulconer lay on the ground with his back propped against a saddle. Faulconer had been stripped to the waist and his chest was swathed in bandages while his right arm was in its blood-stained sling.

  The general reined in and looked sympathetically down at the wounded Colonel. “It’s Faulconer, isn’t it?”

  Washington Faulconer looked up to see a dazzle of yellow braid, but the smoke-diffused sun was behind the horseman and he could not make out the man’s face. “Sir?” he answered very warily, already rehearsing the arguments he would use to explain his Legion’s failure.

  “I’m Joseph Johnston. We met in Richmond four months ago, and of course we had the pleasure of dining together at Jethro Sanders’s house last year.”

  “Of course, sir.” Faulconer had been expecting a reprimand, yet General Johnston sounded more than affable.

  “You must be feeling foul, Faulconer. Is the wound bad?”

  “A six-week scratch, sir, that’s all.” Faulconer knew how to sound suitably modest, though in truth he was desperately readjusting himself to the wonderful realization that General Johnston was not full of recrimination. Washington Faulconer was no fool, and he knew that he had behaved badly or, at the very least, that it might be imputed that he had behaved unwisely by leaving his Legion and thus not being in place to save them from Starbuck’s treachery and Bird’s impetuosity, but if Johnston’s friendliness was any guide then maybe no one had noticed that dereliction of duty?

  “If it hadn’t have been for your sacrifice,” Johnston said, pouring the balm of Gilead onto Faulconer’s self-esteem and making the Colonel’s happiness complete, “the battle would have been lost two hours back. Thank God you were with Evans, that’s all I can say.”

  Faulconer opened his mouth to respond, found nothing whatever to say, so closed it.

  “The federals had Beauregard completely bamboozled,” Johnston went on blithely. “He thought the thing would be decided on the right flank, and all the time the rascals were planning to hit us here. But you fellows got it right, and thank God you did, for you’ve saved the Confederacy.” Johnston was a pernickety, fussy man and a professional soldier of long experience who seemed genuinely moved by the tribute he was paying. “Evans told me of your bravery, Faulconer, and it’s an honor to salute you!” In fact Shanks Evans had paid a tribute to the bravery of the Faulconer Legion and had not mentioned Colonel Washington Faulconer’s name at all, but it was a simple enough misunderstanding and not one that Washington Faulconer thought needed to be corrected at this moment.

  “We merely did our best, sir,” Faulconer managed to say, while in his mind he was already rewriting the whole story of the day—how he had, in fact, known all along that the rebel left lay dangerously exposed. Had he not reconnoite
red toward the Sudley Fords at daybreak? And had he not left his regiment well placed to meet the enemy’s thrust? And had he not been wounded in the subsequent fighting? “I’m just glad we could have been of some small service, sir,” he added modestly.

  Johnston liked Faulconer’s humility. “You’re a brave fellow, Faulconer, and I’ll make it my business to let Richmond know who are the real heroes of Manassas.”

  “My men are the real heroes, sir.” Just ten minutes ago the Colonel had been cursing his men, especially the bandsmen who had jettisoned two expensive sax-horn tubas, a trumpet and three drums in their desperate efforts to escape the northern pursuit. “They’re all good Virginians, sir,” he added, knowing that Joseph Johnston was himself from the old dominion.

  “I salute you all!” Johnston said, though touching his hat specifically to Faulconer before urging his horse on.

  Washington Faulconer lay back and basked in the praise. A hero of Manassas! Even the pain seemed diminished, or maybe that was the morphine that Doctor Danson had insisted he swallow, but even so, a hero! That was a good word and how well it sat on a Faulconer! And maybe six weeks in the Richmond town house would not come amiss, so long, of course, that this battle was won and the Confederacy survived, but granted that proviso, surely a hero stood a better chance of promotion if he dined regularly with the rulers of his country? And what a rebuke to the mudsills like Lee who had been so niggardly in their attitude. Now they would have to deal with a hero! Faulconer smiled at his son. “I think you’ve earned yourself a promotion, Adam.”

  “But…”

  “Quiet! Don’t protest.” The Colonel always felt good when he could behave generously, and this moment was made even better by the burgeoning hopes that his new status as a hero of Manassas made credible. He could surely attain general rank? And he could surely find the time to perfect his Legion, which could then become the jewel and heart of his new brigade. Faulconer’s Brigade. That name had a fine ring, and he imagined Faulconer’s Brigade leading the march into Washington, presenting arms outside the White House and escorting a conqueror on horseback into a humbled land. He took a cigar from the case beside him and jabbed it toward Adam to emphasize the importance of what he said. “I need you to be in charge of the Legion while I’m convalescing. I need you to make sure Pecker doesn’t run wild again, eh? That he doesn’t fritter the Legion away in some piddling skirmish. Besides, the Legion should be in family hands. And you did well today, son, very well.”