Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I did nothing, Father,” Adam protested hotly, “and I’m not even sure—”

  “Now, now! Quiet!” Washington Faulconer had seen Major Bird approaching and did not want Thaddeus to witness his son’s prevarications. “Thaddeus!” The Colonel greeted his brother-in-law with an unaccustomed warmth. “The general asked me to thank you. You did well!”

  Major Bird, who knew full well that the Colonel had been furious with him until just a moment before, stopped dead in his tracks then looked ostentatiously about, as though searching for another man called Thaddeus who might be the object of the Colonel’s praise. “Are you talking to me, Colonel?”

  “You did marvelously well! I congratulate you! You did precisely what I would have expected of you, indeed, exactly what I wanted of you! You held the Legion to its duty till I arrived. Everyone else thought the battle would be on the right, but we knew better, eh? We did well, very well. If my arm wasn’t broken I’d shake your hand. Well done, Thaddeus, well done!”

  Thaddeus Bird managed to hold his laughter in check, though his head did jerk nervously back and forth as if he was about to burst into a fit of devilish cackles. “Am I to understand,” he finally managed to speak without laughing, “that you are also to be congratulated?”

  The Colonel hid his anger at his brother-in-law’s effrontery. “I think you and I know each other well enough to dispense with an exchange of admiration, Thaddeus. Just be assured I’ll put your name forward when I’m in Richmond.”

  “I didn’t come here to offer you admiration,” Thaddeus Bird said with tactless honesty, “but to suggest we send a work party to find some water. The men are parched.”

  “Water? By all means, water. Then you and I should put our heads together and decide what’s needed for the future. Mr. Little tells me we’ve lost some band instruments, and we can’t afford to lose as many officers’ horses as we did today.”

  Band instruments? Horses? Thaddeus Bird gaped at his brother-in-law, wondering if the broken bone had somehow drained Faulconer of his wits. What the Legion needed, Thaddeus Bird decided as the Colonel meandered on, was a McGuffey’s Reader in elementary soldiering, a child’s primer in rifle-fire and drill, but he knew it would be no good saying as much. Faulconer’s huge complacency had been puffed up by some fool’s praise, and he was already seeing himself as the conqueror of New York. Bird tried to sober the Colonel with a small dose of reality. “You’ll want the butcher’s bill, Faulconer?” He interrupted the Colonel. “The list of our dead and wounded?”

  Washington Faulconer again had to hide his irritation. “Is it bad?” he asked guardedly.

  “I have nothing with which to compare it, and sadly it’s incomplete. We misplaced a lot of men in the course of your brave victory, but we know for sure that at least a score are dead. Captain Jenkins is gone, and poor Burroughs, of course. I assume you’ll write to the widow?” Bird paused, but received no answer, so just shrugged and carried on. “Of course there can be other dead ones still out there. We know of twenty-two wounded fellows, some of them atrociously bad—”

  “Twenty-three,” the Colonel interrupted, and offered Thaddeus Bird a modest smile. “I count myself a member of the Legion, Thaddeus.”

  “So do I, Faulconer, and had already numbered you among its heroes. As I said, twenty-two, some of them grievously. Masterson won’t survive, and Norton has lost both his legs so…”

  “I don’t need every detail,” Faulconer said peevishly.

  “And there still appear to be seventy-two men missing,” Bird continued stoically with his bad news. “They aren’t necessarily lost to us forever; Turner MacLean’s boy staggered in five minutes ago having spent the best part of two hours wandering around the battlefield, but he never did have an ounce of sense. Others are probably dead and gone. I hear Ridley was killed.”

  “Murdered,” the Colonel insisted.

  “Murdered, was he?” Bird had already heard the story, but wanted to provoke the Colonel.

  “He was murdered,” the Colonel said, “and I witnessed it, and you will enter that in the regiment’s books.”

  “If we ever find the books,” Bird remarked happily. “We seem to have lost all the baggage.”

  “Murdered! You hear me?” Faulconer thundered the accusation, sending a stab of pain through his wounded chest. “That’s what you will enter. That he was murdered by Starbuck.”

  “And Starbuck’s missing,” Bird went blithely on, “I’m most sorry to say.”

  “You’re sorry?” There was something very dangerous in the Colonel’s voice.

  “You should be too,” Bird said, ignoring the Colonel’s tone. “Starbuck probably saved our colors, and he certainly prevented Adam from being taken prisoner. Didn’t Adam tell you?”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you, Father,” Adam said.

  “Starbuck is gone!” the Colonel said flatly, “and if he was here you would be required to arrest him for murder. I saw him shoot Ridley. I saw him! Do you hear that, Thaddeus?” In fact half the Legion could hear the Colonel, whose indignation soared as he remembered poor Ridley’s death. Good God, Faulconer thought, but did none of these men believe him when he said he had seen Starbuck fire the shots that murdered Ridley! The Colonel had turned in his saddle and watched him fire the revolver! And now Pecker Bird wanted to make out that the Bostonian was some kind of hero? Christ, the Colonel thought, but he was the hero of Manassas! Had not General Johnston said as much? “You say we lost poor Roswell Jenkins?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

  “He was quite obliterated by shellfire,” Bird confirmed, then obstinately changed the subject back. “Are you really ordering me to arrest Starbuck for murder?”

  “If you find him, yes!” the Colonel shouted, then winced as a lance of pain shot down his arm. “For God’s sake, Thaddeus, why do you always have to make such a damn fuss about things?”

  “Because someone has to, Colonel, someone has to.” Bird smiled and turned away while behind him, on a plateau edged with fire, the battle came to its breaking point at last.

  James Starbuck never quite understood why the northern lines broke, he just remembered a desperate panic suddenly overtaking the federal troops until, all order gone, there was nothing but panic as McDowell’s army ran.

  Nothing they had done had moved the southern regiments off the plateau. No assault gained enough ground to let supporting troops reinforce success, and so the northern attacks had been beaten back again and again, and each repulse had whelped its litter of dead and dying men who lay in rows like tidal wrack to mark the limits of each federal assault.

  Ammunition had run short in some northern regiments. The southerners, pushed back toward their own baggage, were distributing tubs of cartridges to their troops, but the northern supplies were still east of the Bull Run and every wagon or limber or caisson had to be brought through the traffic jam that developed around the stone bridge and too often, even when ammunition was brought to the hilltop, it proved to be the wrong kind and so troops armed with .58 rifles received .69 musket ammunition and, as their rifles fell silent, they retreated to leave a gap in the northern line into which the gray rebels moved.

  On both sides the rifles and muskets misfired or broke. The cones through which the percussion cap spat its fire into the powder charge broke most frequently, but as the southerners pressed forward they could pick up the guns of the northern dead and so keep up the slaughter. Yet still the northerners fought on. Their rifle and musket barrels were fouled with the clinker of burnt powder so that each shot took a huge effort to ram home, and the day was hot and the air filled with acrid powder smoke so that the mouths and gullets of the weary men were dry and raw, and their shoulders were bruised black from the recoil of the heavy guns, and their voices hoarse from shouting, their eyes were smarting with smoke, their ears ringing with the hammer blows of the big guns, their arms aching from ramming the bullets down the fouled barrels, yet still they fought. They bled and fought, curse
d and fought, prayed and fought. Some of the men seemed dazed, just standing open-eyed and open-mouthed, oblivious to their officers’ shouts or to the discordant din of bullets, guns, shells and screams.

  James Starbuck had lost all sense of time. He reloaded his revolver, fired and reloaded. He scarce knew what he was doing, only that every shot could save the Union. He was terrified, but he fought on, taking an odd courage from the thought of his younger sister. He had decided that Martha alone would mourn him and that he could not disgrace her affection and it was that resolve which held him to his place where he fought like a ranker, firing and loading, firing and loading, and all the while saying Martha’s name aloud like a talisman that would keep him brave. Martha was the sister whose character was most like Nathaniel’s, and as James stood amid the litter of wounded and dead, he could have wept that God had not given him Martha and Nathaniel’s brazen daring.

  Then, just as he manipulated the last of his small percussion caps onto his revolver’s cones, a cheer spread along the southern line and James looked up to see the whole enemy front surging forward. He straightened his aching bruised arm and pointed the revolver at what looked like a vast rat-gray army scorched black by powder burns that was charging straight toward him.

  Then, just as he muttered his sister’s name and half-flinched from the noise his revolver would make, he saw he was utterly alone.

  One moment there had been a battle, and now there was rout.

  For the federal army had broken and run.

  They pelted down the hill, discipline gone to the wind. Men threw away rifles and muskets, bayonets and haversacks, and just fled. Some ran north toward the Sudley Fords while others ran for the stone bridge. A few men tried to stem the charge, shouting at their fellow northerners to form line and stand firm, but the few were swamped by the many. The panicked troops flooded the fields on either side of the turnpike on which a limbered cannon, its horses whipped into a frantic gallop, ran down screaming infantrymen with its iron-shod wheels. Other men used battle standards as spears with which to fight their way toward the stream.

  The rebel pursuit stopped at the plateau’s edge. A spattering of musket fire hurried the northerners’ retreat, but no one on the rebel side had the energy to pursue. Instead they reveled in the slow realization of victory and in the scurrying defeat of the panicked horde beneath them. The rebel gunners brought their surviving cannon to the hillcrest and the southern shells screamed away into the afternoon warmth to explode in bursts of smoke along the crowded turnpike and in the farther woods. One of the shots burst in the air plumb above the wooden bridge that carried the turnpike over the deep tributary of the Run just as a wagon was crossing. The wagon’s wounded horses panicked and tried to bolt, but the fatal shell had torn off a front wheel and the massive vehicle slewed round, its broken axle gouging timber so that the heavy wagon body was jammed immovably between the bridge’s wooden parapets, and thus the northern army’s main escape road was blocked and still more shells screamed down to explode among the fleeing northerners. The federal guns, carriages, limbers and wagons still on the Bull Run’s western bank were abandoned as their teamsters fled for safety. A shell exploded in the stream, spouting tons of water. More shells smacked behind, driving the panicked mass of men in a maddened scramble down the steep slippery bank and into the Run’s quick current. Scores of men drowned, pushed under by their own desperate comrades. Others floundered across the deep stream and somehow pulled themselves free and then ran toward Washington.

  Nathaniel Starbuck had watched the rout spill over the plateau’s edge. At first he had not believed what he saw, then disbelief turned to amazement. The sergeant guarding the prisoners had taken one look at the hillside, then ran. A wounded northerner, recuperating in the yard, had limped away, using his musket as a crutch. The red-bearded doctor came to the door in his blood-spattered apron, took one incredulous look at the whole scene, then shook his head and went back inside to his patients.

  “What do we do now?” one of the rebel prisoners asked Starbuck, as if an officer might know the etiquette of handling victory in the middle of a defeated rabble.

  “We stay real quiet and polite,” Starbuck advised. There were northerners fleeing past the house and some were looking angrily at the southern prisoners. “Stay sitting, don’t move, just wait.” He watched a northern field gun retreating off the plateau. The gun captain had somehow managed to assemble a team of four horses which, whipped bloody by their frightened drivers, were galloping recklessly down the shell-scarred slope so that the gunners perched on the narrow limber seat were clinging grimly to the metal handles. The horses were white-eyed and scared. The gun itself, attached behind the limber, bounced dangerously as the rig splashed through a streamlet at the hill’s foot, then the driver pulled on his reins and the panicked horses turned too fast onto the turnpike and Starbuck watched in horror as first the cannon, then the limber, tipped, rolled and slid hard across the road to crash sickeningly into the trees at the edge of the yard. There was a moment’s silence, then the first screams tore the humid air.

  “Oh, Christ.” A wounded man turned in horror from the carnage. A horse, both rear legs broken, tried to scramble free of the bloody wreckage. One of the gunners had been trapped under the limber and the man clawed feebly at the splintered timbers that impaled him. A passing infantry sergeant ignored the wounded man as he cut the traces of the one uninjured horse, unhooked its chains, then scrambled onto its back. A roundshot from the spilt limber trundled across the road and the wounded horses went on screaming like the dying gunner.

  “Oh God, no.” One of the prisoners in the tree-shaded yard was a tidewater Virginian who now recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. The awful screaming went on until a northern officer walked over to the wounded animals and fired into their skulls. It took five shots, but the animals died, leaving only the shrieking, gasping, writhing gunner who was impaled by the mangled spokes of the limber’s wheel. The officer took a breath. “Soldier!”

  The man must have recognized the tone of authority for he went still for just a second, and that second was all the officer needed. He aimed the revolver, pulled the trigger and the gunner fell back silent. The northern officer shuddered, tossed away the empty revolver then walked away weeping. The world seemed very quiet suddenly. It stank of blood, but it was quiet until the tidewater boy said the Lord’s Prayer one more time, as though the repetition of the words could save his soul.

  “Are you boys safe?” A gray-coated officer galloped his horse down to the crossroads.

  “We’re safe,” Starbuck said.

  “We whipped ’em, boys! Whipped ’em good!” the officer boasted.

  “You want an apple, mister?” A South Carolina prisoner, released now, had been searching among the knapsacks that had spilled from the fallen gun limber and now plucked some apples from among the bloody wreckage. He tossed the jubilant officer a bright red apple. “Go whip ’em some more!”

  The officer caught the apple. Behind him the first southern infantry was advancing toward the Bull Run. Starbuck watched for a while, then turned away. War’s lottery had freed him yet again, and he had one more promise yet to keep.

  Tired men collected the wounded, those they could find. Some of the injured were in woodland, and doomed to slow and forgotten deaths in the undergrowth. Thirsty men looked for water while some just drank the fouled liquid in the cannons’ sponge buckets, gulping down the gunpowder debris along with the warm, salty liquid. The small wind was brisker now, stirring the camp fires that men made from shattered musket stocks and fence rails.

  The rebels were in no state to pursue the federal troops, and so they stayed on the battlefield and stared in dazed astonishment at the plunder of victory—at the guns and wagons and caissons, at the mounds of captured stores and at the hordes of prisoners. A fat congressman from Rochester, New York, was among those prisoners; he had been found trying to hide his vast belly behind a slim sapling and had been brought to
the army headquarters where he blustered about the importance of his position and demanding to be released. A rail-thin Georgian soldier told him to shut his damned fat mouth before he had his damned fat tongue cut out to be cooked and served with an apple sauce and the congressman fell instantly silent.

  At dusk the rebels crossed the Run to capture the thirty-pound Parrott field rifle that had signaled the federal attack that dawn. The northerners had abandoned twenty-six other guns, along with nearly all their army’s baggage. Southern soldiers found full-dress uniforms carefully packed ready for the triumphant entry into Richmond and a North Carolinian soldier paraded proudly about in a Yankee general’s finery, complete with epaulettes, sword, sash and spurs. The pockets of the dead were rifled for their pitiful haul of combs, playing cards, testaments, jackknives and coins. A lucky few found wealthier corpses, one with a heavy watch chain hung with golden seals, another with a ruby ring on his wedding finger. Daguerreotypes of wives and sweethearts, parents and children were tossed aside, for the victors were not looking for mementoes of shattered affections, but only for coins and cigars, silver and gold, good boots, fine shirts, belts, buckles or weapons. A brisk market in plunder established itself; fine officers’ field glasses were sold for a dollar, swords for three, and fifty-dollar Colt revolvers for five or six. Most prized of all were the posing photographs showing New York and Chicago ladies out of their clothes. Some of the men refused to look, fearing hell’s fires, but most passed the pictures around and wondered at the plunder that would come their way if ever they were called upon to invade the rich, plump, soft North that bred such women and such fine rooms. Doctors from North and South worked together in the farm hospitals of the scorched, torn battlefield. The wounded wept, the amputated legs and arms and hands and feet piled in the yards, while the dead were stacked like cordwood for the graves that must wait for morning to be dug.