Starbuck saw the first Yankees. Two men were using a fallen tree as a firing position. One was reloading, working the long ramrod down his rifle while his companion aimed across the trunk. The man fired and Starbuck saw the kick of the rifle on the man’s shoulder and the puff of spark-lit smoke where the percussion cap exploded. Beyond the two men the woods suddenly seemed thick with blue uniforms and, more oddly, gray coats that hung from trees and twitched as rebel bullets struck home. “Kill them!” Starbuck screamed, and the two men by the fallen tree turned to stare in horror at the rebel charge. The man who had reloaded his rifle swung it to face Starbuck, aimed, then pulled the trigger, but in his panic he had forgotten to prime his rifle. The hammer fell with a click onto bare steel. The man scrambled to his feet and ran past an officer who stood with drawn sword and a look of appalled bewilderment on his whiskered face. Starbuck, seeing the officer’s expression, knew he had done the right thing. “Kill them,” he screamed, completely unaware that he was uttering anything so bloodthirsty. He just felt the elation of a man who has outwitted an enemy and so imposed his will on a battlefield. That feeling was intoxicating, filling him with a manic elation. “Kill them!” he screamed again, and this time the words seemed to spur the whole Yankee flank into disintegration.
The northerners fled. Some threw themselves off the bluff’s edge and slithered down the slope, but most ran back along the line of the summit and, as they ran, more men joined the flight, and the retreat became ever more crowded and chaotic. Starbuck tripped on a wounded man who screamed foully, then ran into the clearing where the Rhode Island cannon had plowed its ragged furrow back and over the bluff’s crest. He jumped a box of ammunition, still screaming his challenge at the men running ahead.
Not all the northerners ran. Many of the officers reckoned that duty was more important than safety and, with a bravery that was close to suicide, stayed to fight the rebels’ flanking attack. One lieutenant calmly aimed his revolver, fired once, then went down under two bayonets. He tried to fire the revolver even as he was dying, then a third rebel put a bullet into his head and there was a spray of blood as the shot struck home. The Lieutenant died, though the men with the bayonets still savaged his corpse with the ferocity of hunting dogs rending a fallen buck. Starbuck shouted at his men to let the dead man alone and hurry on. He did not want to give the Yankees time to recover.
Adam Faulconer was riding his horse in the sunlit clearing, shouting for the rest of the Legion to cross over and support Starbuck’s company. Major Bird led the color party across into evening woods full of the shrill sound of rebels attacking, of gunshots and of northern officers shouting orders that stood no chance of being obeyed in the panic.
Truslow told a northerner to drop his rifle, the man either did not hear or decided to defy the demand, and the bowie knife chopped down once with a horrid economy of effort. A group of Yankees, their retreat blocked, turned and ran blindly back toward their attackers. Most stopped when they saw their mistake and raised their hands in surrender, but one, an officer, sliced his sword in a wild blow at Starbuck’s face. Starbuck checked, let the blade hiss by, then rammed his bayonet forward and down. He felt the steel hit the Yankee’s ribs and cursed that he had stabbed down instead of up.
“Nate!” The Yankee officer gasped. “No! Please!”
“Jesus!” The blasphemy was torn from Starbuck. The man he was attacking was a member of his father’s church, an old acquaintance with whom Starbuck had endured an eternity of Sunday school lessons. The last news Starbuck had heard of William Lewis was that he had become a student at Harvard, but now he was gasping as Starbuck’s bayonet scored down his ribs.
“Nate?” Lewis asked. “Is it you?”
“Drop your sword, Will!”
William Lewis shook his head, not out of obstinate refusal, but out of puzzlement that his old friend should appear in the unlikely guise of a rebel. Then, seeing the look of fury on Starbuck’s face, he let the sword drop. “I surrender, Nate!”
Starbuck left him standing over the fallen sword and ran on to catch his men. The encounter with an old friend had unnerved him. Was he fighting a Boston battalion? If so, how many more of this beaten enemy would recognize him? What familiar households would he plunge into mourning by his actions on this Virginia hilltop? Then he forgot his qualms as he saw a giant bearded man howling at the rebels. The man, dressed in shirtsleeves and suspenders, was using one hand to swing an artillery rammer like a club, while in his other he held a short Roman-pattern stabbing sword that was standard issue to gunners. His retreat had been cut off, but he was refusing to surrender, preferring, to die like a hero than yield like a coward. He had already felled one of Starbuck’s men; now he challenged the others to fight him. Sergeant Mallory, who was Truslow’s brother-in-law, fired at the huge man, but the bullet missed and the bearded gunner turned like a fury on the wiry Mallory.
“He’s mine!” Starbuck shouted and pushed Mallory aside, lunged forward, then swayed back as the huge man whirled the rammer. This, Starbuck reckoned, was his duty as an officer. The company must see that he was the least afraid, the most ready to fight. Besides, today he felt unbeatable. The scream of battle was in his veins like a splash of fire. He laughed as he lunged with the bayonet, only to have the blade knocked hard aside by the short sword.
“Bastard!” the gunner spat at Starbuck, then slashed the short sword in quick vicious sweeps, trying to keep Starbuck’s attention on the blade while he swung the rammer. He thought he had tricked the rebel officer and bellowed with a kind of joy as he anticipated the clublike wooden head smashing his enemy’s skull, but Starbuck ducked hard down so that it hissed over his slouch hat and the momentum of the great swing was sufficient to sway the big man off-balance. Then it was Starbuck’s turn to shout in triumph as he rammed the bayonet up, hard up, pushing against the astonishing resistance of skin and flesh, and he was still screaming as the big man jerked and fell, twitching on the blade’s long shank like a gaffed fish dying.
Starbuck was breathless as he tried to pull his bayonet free, but the gunner’s flesh had closed tight on the steel and the blade would not move. The man had dropped his own weapons and was clawing feebly at the rifle in his gut. Starbuck also tried to twist the steel free, but the flesh’s suction gripped like stone. He pulled the rifle’s trigger, hoping to blast the bayonet loose, but still it would not move. The gunner gasped horribly as the bullet struck, then Starbuck abandoned the weapon and left the gunner dying on the forest floor. He unholstered his fine ivory-handled revolver instead and ran after his company only to discover that K Company was no longer alone in the woods, but was merely a small part of a gray and butternut tide that was overwhelming the northern defenders and driving the survivors in a terrible stampede off the bluffs summit and down to the narrow, muddy ledge beside the river. A New York sergeant screamed as he lost his precarious footing and tumbled down the slope to break his leg on a rock.
“Nate!” Adam had spurred his stallion into the trees. “Call them off!”
Starbuck stared uncomprehendingly at his friend.
“It’s over! You’ve won!” Adam said and gestured at the mass of rebels who had begun firing down the bluff’s steep slope at the Yankees trapped beneath. “Stop them!” Adam said, as if he blamed Starbuck for this display of gleeful, vengeful victory, then he turned his horse savagely away to find someone with the authority to finish the killing.
Except no one wanted to end the killing. The northerners were trapped beneath the bluff and the southerners poured a merciless fire into the writhing, crawling, bleeding mass below. A rush of Yankees tried to escape the slaughter by trampling over the wounded to the safety of a newly arrived boat, but the weight of the fugitives overturned the small craft. A man called for help as the current dragged him away. Others tried to swim the channel, but the water was churning and spattering with the strike of bullets. Blood soured the stream and was carried seaward. Men drowned, men died, men bled, and still the remorseless,
unending slaughter went on as the rebels loaded and fired, loaded and fired, loaded and fired, jeering all the while at their beaten, cowed, broken enemy.
Starbuck edged his way to the bluff’s edge and stared down at a scene from the inferno. The base of the bluff’s escarpment was like a wriggling, sensate mass; an enormous beast dying in the gathering dusk, though it was not yet a fangless beast for shots still came up the slope. Starbuck pushed his revolver into his belt and cupped his hands and shouted downhill for the Yankees to cease fire. “You’re prisoners!” he shouted, but the only answer was a splintering of rifle flames in the shadows and the whistle of a fusillade past his head. Starbuck pulled his revolver free and emptied its chambers down the hill. Truslow was beside him, taking loaded rifles from men behind and firing at the heads of men trying to swim to safety. The river was being beaten into a froth, looking just as though a school of fish were churning frantically to escape a tidal shallow. Bodies drifted downstream, others snagged on branches or lodged on mudbanks. The Potomac had become a river of death, blood-streaked, bullet-lashed, and body-filled. Major Bird grimaced at the view, but did nothing to stop his men firing.
“Uncle!” Adam protested. “Stop them!”
But instead of stopping the slaughter, Bird gazed down on it like some explorer who had just stumbled upon some phenomenon of nature. It was Bird’s view that war involved butchery, and to engage in war but protest against butchery was inconsistent. Besides, the Yankees would not surrender but were still returning the rebel fire, and Bird now answered Adam’s demand by raising his own revolver and firing a shot into the turmoil.
“Uncle!” Adam cried in protest.
“Our job is to kill Yankees,” Bird said and watched as his nephew galloped away. “And their job is to kill us,” Bird went on, even though Adam had long since gone from earshot, “and if we leave them alive today then tomorrow their turn might come.” He turned back to the horror and emptied his revolver harmlessly into the river. All around him men grimaced as they fired and Bird watched them, seeing a blood lust raging, but as the shadows lengthened and the return fire stuttered to nothing and as the fear and passion of the long day’s climax ebbed away, so the men ceased firing and turned away from the twitching, bloodied river.
Bird found Starbuck pulling a pair of spectacles from a dead man’s face. The lenses were thick with clotted blood that Starbuck wiped on his coat hem. “Losing your vision, Nate?” Bird asked.
“Joe May lost his glasses. We’re trying to find a pair that suits.”
“I wish you could find him a new brain. He’s one of the dullest creatures it was ever my misfortune to teach,” Bird said, holstering his revolver. “I have to thank you for disobeying me. Well done.” Starbuck grinned at the compliment, and Bird saw the feral glee on the northerner’s face and wondered that battle could give such joy to a man. Bird supposed that some men were born to be soldiers as others were born to be healers or teachers or farmers, and Starbuck, Bird reckoned, was a soldier born to the dark trade. “Moxey complained about you,” Bird told Starbuck, “so what shall we do about Moxey?”
“Give the son of a bitch to the Yankees,” Starbuck said, then walked with Bird away from the bluffs crest, back into the trees where a company of Mississippi men was gathering prisoners. Starbuck avoided the sullen-looking northerners, not wanting to be recognized by a fellow Bostonian. One Mississippi soldier had picked up a fallen white banner which he paraded through the twilight, and Starbuck saw the handsome escutcheon of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts embroidered on the blood-flecked silk. He wondered whether Will Lewis was still on the bluff’s summit or whether, in the chaos of the defeat, the Lieutenant had sneaked off down to the river and made a bid for the far bank. And what would they say in Boston, Starbuck wondered, when they heard that the Reverend Elial’s son had been screaming the rebel yell and wearing the ragged gray and shooting at men who worshipped in the Reverend’s church? Damn what they said. He was a rebel, his lot thrown in with the defiant South and not with these smart, well-equipped northern soldiers who seemed like a different breed to the grinning, long-haired southerners.
He left Bird with the Legion’s own colors and went on hunting through the woods, looking for spectacles or any other useful plunder that the corpses might yield. Some of the dead looked very peaceful, most looked astonished. They lay with their heads tipped back, their mouths open, and their outreaching hands contracted into claws. Flies were busy at nostrils and glazed eyes. Above the dead the discarded, bullet-torn gray coats of the northerners were still suspended from branches to look like hanged men in the fading light. Starbuck found one of the scarlet-lined coats neatly folded and placed at the bole of a tree and, thinking it would be useful in the coming winter, picked it up and shook out the folds to see that it was unscarred by either bullet or bayonet. A nametape had been neatly sewn into the coat’s neck, and Starbuck peered to read the letters that had been so meticulously inked onto the small white strip. “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,” the label read, “20th Mass.” The name brought Starbuck a sudden and intense memory of a clever Boston family, and of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes’s study with its specimen jars on high shelves. One such jar had held a wrinkled, pallid human brain, Starbuck remembered, while others had strange, big-headed homunculi suspended in cloudy liquid. The family did not worship at Starbuck’s church, but the Reverend Elial approved of Professor Holmes, and so Starbuck had been allowed to spend time in the doctor’s house where he had become friendly with Oliver Wendell Junior, who was an intense, thin, and friendly young man, quick in debate and generous in nature. Starbuck hoped his old friend had survived the fight. Then, draping Holmes’s heavy coat about his shoulders, he went to find his rifle and to discover just how his men had fared in the battle.
In the dark, Adam Faulconer vomited.
He knelt in the soft leaf mold beneath a maple tree and retched till his belly was dry and his throat sore, and then he closed his eyes and prayed as though the very future of mankind depended on the intensity of his petition.
Adam knew that he had been told lies, and, what was worse, knew that he had willingly believed those lies. He had believed that one hard battle would be a sufficient bloodletting to lance the disease that beset America, but instead the single battle had merely worsened the fever, and today he had watched men kill like beasts. He had seen his best friend, his neighbors, and his mother’s brother kill like animals. He had seen men descend into hell, and he had seen their victims die like vermin.
It was dark now, but still a great moaning came from the foot of the bluff where scores of northerners lay bleeding and dying. Adam had tried to go down and offer help, but a voice had screamed at him to get the hell away and a rifle had fired blindly up the slope toward him, and that one defiant shot had been sufficient to provoke another rebel fusillade from the bluffs crest. More men had screamed in the dark and wept in the night.
Around Adam a few fires burned, and around those fires the victorious rebels sat with grinning devil faces. They had looted the dead and rifled the pockets of the prisoners. Colonel Lee of the 20th Massachusetts had been forced to surrender his fine braided jacket to a Mississippi muleskinner who now sat wearing it before a fire and wiping the grease from his hands on the coat’s skirts. There was the raw smell of whiskey in the night air and the sour stench of blood and the sweet-sick odor of the rotting dead. A handful of southern casualties had been buried in the sloping meadow that looked south toward Catoctin Mountain, but the northern bodies were still unburied. Most had been collected and stacked like cordwood, but a few undiscovered corpses were still hidden in the undergrowth. In the morning a work party of slaves would be fetched from the nearby farms and made to dig a trench big enough to hold the Yankee dead. Near the stack of bloody corpses a man played a fiddle beside a fire and a few men sang softly to his mournful tune.
God, Adam decided, had abandoned these men, just as they had abandoned Him. Today, on the edge of a river, they had arrogated God�
��s choice of life and death. They were, Adam decided in his wrought state, given to evil. It did not matter that some of the victorious rebels had prayed in the dusk and had tried to help their beaten enemy; they were all, in Adam’s view, scorched by the devil’s breath.
Because the devil had taken America in his grip and was dragging the fairest country on earth down to his foul nest, and Adam, who had let himself be persuaded that the South needed its one moment of martial glory, knew he had come to his own sticking point. He knew he had to make a decision, and that the decision involved the risk of severing himself from his family and his neighbors and his friends and even from the girl he loved, but it was better, he told himself as he knelt in the death- and vomit-scented air of the bluffs crest, to lose his Julia than to lose his soul.
The war must be ended. That was Adam’s decision. He had tried to avert the conflict before the fighting ever began. He had worked with the Christian Peace Commission and he had seen that band of pious worthies swamped by the fervent supporters of war, so now he would use the war to end the war. He would betray the South because only by that betrayal could he save his country. The North must be given all the help he could give it, and as an aide to the South’s commanding general Adam knew he could give the North more help than most other men.
He prayed in the dark and his prayer seemed to be answered when a great peace descended on him. The peace told Adam that his decision was a good one. He would become a traitor and would yield his country to its enemy in the name of God and for America.
Bodies floated downstream in the dark, carried toward the Chesapeake Bay and the distant ocean. Some of the corpses were trapped on the weirs by Great Falls where the river turned south toward Washington, but most were carried through the rapids and floated through the night to snag on the piles of the Long Bridge that carried the road south from Washington into Virginia. The river washed the corpses clean so that by the dawn, when the citizens of Washington walked beside the waters and looked down at the mud-shoals by its banks, they saw their sons all clean and white, their dead skins gleaming, though the bodies were now so swollen with gas that they strained the buttons and stretched the seams of their lavish new uniforms.
Copperhead Page 7