Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Starbuck?” Bird ventured.

  “How did you guess?” Swynyard sounded astonished, but also impressed by Bird’s acuity. “Starbuck indeed, Bird. A bad business. I hate to disappoint a man, Bird, it ain’t my style. We Swynyards have always been forthright, to a fault I sometimes think, but we’re too long in the tooth to change now. Starbuck exactly. The General won’t abide him, you know, and we have to get rid of him. I promised I’d do it tactfully, and thought you might know best how to do that?”

  “We’ve done it already,” Bird said bitterly. “He went last night.”

  “He did?” Swynyard blinked at Bird. “He did? Good! First chop! Your doing, I assume? Well done! Then there’s no more to be said, is there? Good to meet you, Bird.” He raised the whip in a farewell salute, then suddenly turned back. “There was one other thing, Bird.”

  “Colonel?”

  “I’ve some reading matter for your men. Something to cheer them up.” Swynyard gave Bird a yellow grin. “They look a bit sullen, as if they need something to enthuse them. Send a man to collect the booklets, will you? And order any man who can’t read to have a friend read it aloud. Good! Well done! Carry on!”

  Bird watched the Colonel walk away, then closed his eyes and shook his head as if verifying that the damp morning was not an awful dream. It seemed it was not and that the world really was quite irretrievably insane. “Maybe,” he said to no one in particular, “the Yankees have got one just like him. Let’s hope so.”

  Over the valley the mounted Yankee pickets turned and vanished into the damp woods. The southern artillery limbered its guns and followed Colonel Swynyard’s wagon south, leaving the Legion to extinguish its fires and pull on its damp boots.

  The retreat went on, and it felt like defeat.

  The great mass of the Army of the Potomac did not advance beyond Manassas. Instead, in a maneuver designed to throw the rebel forces off balance, the troops returned to Alexandria, just across the river from Washington, where a fleet waited to carry them down the Potomac and out into the Chesapeake Bay and so south to the Union stronghold of Fort Monroe. The fleet had been chartered by the U.S. government and the masts of the waiting ships made a forest above the river. There were sidewheelers from as far north as Boston, ferryboats from the Delaware, schooners from a score of ports on the Atlantic seaboard, and even transatlantic passenger boats with needle-sharp bows and elegant gilt scrollwork handsome about their poops. The steam from a hundred engines hissed into the air while the scream of a hundred whistles frightened the horses that waited to be loaded into the bowels of the vessels. Steam derricks lifted nets of cargo aboard as lines of soldiers climbed the sloping gangplanks. Guns and caissons, limbers and portable forges were tied down on the steamers’ decks. McClellan’s staff reckoned it would take twenty days for the whole expedition to be transported, all one hundred and twenty-one thousand men with their three hundred cannons, and eleven hundred wagons, and fifteen thousand horses, and ten thousand beef cattle, and the seemingly endless bales of forage and pontoon boats and drums of telegraph wire and barrels of powder, all of which needed to be protected during the voyage by the battleships and frigates and gunboats of the U.S. Navy. The fleet of the Army of the Potomac was the largest ever assembled, proof of the Union’s resolve to end the rebellion with one massive stroke. Those mudsills who had complained of McClellan’s supine nature would now see how the Young Napoleon could fight! He would take his army to the lightly guarded tongue of land that stretched seventy miles southeastward from Richmond and like a thunderbolt, strike west to capture the rebels’ capital and destroy their resolve.

  “I have held you back that you might give the deathblow to the rebellion that has distracted our once happy country,” McClellan’s printed proclamation explained to his troops, then it promised that their General would look over his soldiers “as a parent over his children; and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his heart.” The proclamation warned the troops that there would be desperate combats, but also assured them that when they carried their victory home they would regard their membership in the Army of the Potomac as the greatest honor of their lives.

  “Fine sentiments,” James Starbuck said when he read the proclamation that had been produced on the printing press that traveled with the army headquarters, and he was not alone in admiring the fine words and noble feelings. The northern newspapers might call McClellan the Young Napoleon, but the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac knew their general as “Little Mac” and declared there was no finer soldier in all the world. If any man could bring swift victory it was Little Mac, who had persuaded the Army of the Potomac that they were the best-equipped, best-drilled, and best-trained soldiers in the Republic’s history, if not in all the world’s history, and though Little Mac’s political enemies might complain of his caution and sing sarcastically that all was quiet on the Potomac, the soldiers knew their General had just been waiting for the perfect moment to strike. That moment had now come as hundreds of paddlewheels and propellers churned the Potomac white and hundreds of smokestacks vented coalsmoke to a blue spring sky. The first ships dropped downriver, bands playing, to dip their ensigns as they steamed past George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon.

  “They’ll need more than sentiments,” Allen Pinkerton remarked darkly to James. General McClellan’s Secret Service Bureau was waiting in a commandeered house close to the Alexandria quays until the General himself was ready to sail, and this morning, as James and his chief stared across the rail lines to the busy quays, Pinkerton was waiting for the arrival of visitors. The rest of the bureau was employed collating the latest scraps of information that had arrived from the South. Every day brought an indigestible mass of such information from deserters or from escaping slaves or in letters from northern sympathizers that were smuggled across the Rappahannock, yet Pinkerton trusted none of it. He wanted to hear from his best agent, Timothy Webster, and through Webster from James’s mysterious friend, but for weeks now there had been an ominous silence from Richmond. The good news in that silence was that there had been no mention in the Richmond newspapers of any arrests and no gossip had come north about high-placed southern officers being accused of treason, but Webster’s silence worried Pinkerton. “We need to give the General the best intelligence possible,” he told James repeatedly. Pinkerton never referred to General McClellan as Little Mac, not even as the Young Napoleon, but always as the General.

  “We can certainly reassure the General that the peninsula is lightly defended?” James remarked. He was working at a small camp table that he had set up on the verandah.

  “Ah, ha! But that’s precisely what the southerners want us to believe,” Pinkerton said, turning excitedly to see if a clatter of hooves presaged the arrival of his visitors. A horseman rode past and Pinkerton subsided. “But until I hear further news from your friend, then I’ll believe nothing!”

  Adam had already sent one reply through the good offices of Timothy Webster, and that one reply had been astonishingly detailed. Except in guns, Adam had written, the defenses facing Fort Monroe were very lightly held. Major General Magruder was screening the fort with four weak brigades, comprising just twenty under-strength battalions. In infantry, at the last count, those battalions had contained just ten thousand men, most of whom Magruder had concentrated in earth-walled forts on Mulberry Island on the southern side of the peninsula and in similar fortifications at Yorktown on the northern side. Some of the Yorktown defenses, Adam had added pedantically, were relics from the unsuccessful British defense of 1783. The fourteen miles between Yorktown and Mulberry Island were guarded by a mere four thousand men and a scatter of dirt forts. Magruder’s weakness in numbers was partly compensated by a concentration of artillery, and Adam reported ominously that no fewer than eighty-five pieces of heavy artillery and fifty-five lighter field guns were incorporated in the rebels’ defenses. Nevertheless, Adam stressed, even all those guns could not cover every path or track on the peninsula. />
  Ten miles behind the Yorktown line, Adam reported, close to the small college town of Williamsburg, Magruder had prepared some more earth forts, but these were presently unmanned. Otherwise, Adam said, there were no defenses between Fort Monroe and the new trenches and redoubts being dug around Richmond by General Robert E. Lee. Adam had added apologetically that his information was a week or so out of date and that he understood some further reinforcements were soon to be sent to General Magruder, and he promised to send details of those reinforcements just as soon as he learned of them.

  Those further details had never come; indeed no news of any kind had come either from Adam or from Timothy Webster. Their sudden silence was worrying, though James did not believe the silence had any military significance, for every single report that came out of rebel Virginia served to confirm the accuracy of Adam’s first detailed account of the peninsula’s defenses. The consensus of those reports suggested that Magruder’s lines were very thinly held and the last thing the rebels expected was a massive attack from the sea, and James could not understand why Pinkerton was not reassured by that intelligence. Now, waiting on the porch of the Alexandria house, James pleaded with his chief to trust the news coming from beyond the rebel lines. “Magruder, even with his reinforcements, can’t have more than fourteen thousand men,” James said firmly. He had read every scrap of intelligence coming from the South, and only a handful of the reports contradicted Adam’s figures, and that handful James suspected were planted reports intended to mislead the Federal high command. Every instinct in his soul told James that the Young Napoleon would brush the enemy aside with a contemptuous ease. The one hundred and ten thousand men shipping out of the Alexandria quays would meet just fourteen or fifteen thousand rebels, and James, for the life of him, did not understand Pinkerton’s qualms.

  “They just want us to think they’re weak, Jimmy!” Pinkerton now explained his worries. “They want to suck us in before they hit us!” He feinted like a man playing fisticuffs. “Think about your figures!”

  James had been thinking about precious little else for two weeks now, but still he humored the small Scotsman. “You know something I don’t, Major?”

  “In war, James, not every man fights.” Pinkerton had been sorting through newspapers at another table on the verandah, but now, after weighting the papers against the day’s small wind, he began to stride up and down the wooden deck. On the river, in a pale sunlight, a great transatlantic steamer was maneuvering herself into the wharf where three New Jersey regiments waited. The ship’s massive paddle-wheels churned mightily and a small tugboat thumped angry puffs of black smoke as it butted its padded bow against the steamer’s elegant bows. One of the regimental bands was playing “Rally Round the Flag, Boys!” and Pinkerton was beating time to the music as he paced the porch. “In war, Jimmy, only a handful of men actually carry a rifle and bayonet to the enemy, yet thousands more serve, and serve nobly! You and I are fighting for the union, yet we do not march in the mud like common rankers. You’ll grant me the point?”

  “Of course,” James said cautiously. He could not bring himself to call Pinkerton “Bulldog,” though other members of the department cheerfully used the small Scotsman’s nickname.

  “So!” Pinkerton turned at the end of the verandah. “We agree that not every man is counted in the ranks, only those who actually carry a rifle, you grasp my point? Yet behind those weapon-carrying heroes, Jimmy, are a host of cooks and clerks, of signalmen and teamsters, of staff men and generals, of bandsmen and doctors, of orderlies and provosts, of engineers and commissary clerks.” Pinkerton accompanied this catalog of men by expansive gestures which summoned an imaginary host from the air. “My point, Jimmy, is that behind the fighting men are thousands of other souls who are feeding and supplying, supporting and directing, and all pushing forward to make the fighting possible. You grasp my argument?”

  “Up to a point, yes,” James said cautiously, his tone suggesting that while he grasped his chief’s argument, he was not yet persuaded by it.

  “Your friend himself said that reinforcements were being sent to Magruder’s lines,” Pinkerton declared vigorously. “How many men? We don’t know! Where are they? We don’t know! And how many are uncounted? We don’t know!” Pinkerton stopped beside James’s table and seized a pencil and sheet of paper. “We don’t know, James, but let us make some educated estimates. You reckon that Magruder has fourteen thousand men? Very good, let us start with that figure.” He scribbled the number at the top of the sheet of paper. “Those, of course, are only the men present at roll call, so we have to add in those at sick call and those on furlough, and you can be sure that those fellows will rally round their filthy flag as soon as the fighting begins. So how many would that be? Six thousand? Seven? Call it seven.” He scribbled the new number beneath the first. “So now we have deduced that General Magruder has at least twenty-one thousand men, and those twenty-one thousand need feeding and supplying, and those duties must add at least another ten thousand troops, and we should not forget the bandsmen and hospital men and all the ancillaries who make an army work, and they must surely total a further ten thousand men.” Pinkerton added that figure to his column. “And then we must reckon that the enemy are almost certainly trying to mislead us by undercounting their numbers, so a prudent man would add fifty percent to our final figure to compensate for their lying deceptions, and what do we have?” He spent a few seconds scribbling his calculations. “There! Sixty-one thousand, five hundred men! Some of the spies give a figure close to that, don’t they?” Pinkerton leafed through the piles of paper, looking for some of the reports James had discarded as being too carefully contrived. “There!” He flourished one such letter. “And that’s just at Yorktown, James! Who knows how many are garrisoned in the towns behind Yorktown?”

  James rather thought the number was zero, but he did not like to contradict the small Scotsman who was so energetically sure of himself.

  “My report to the General,” Pinkerton proclaimed, “will say that he can expect to fight at least sixty thousand men in the Yorktown entrenchments. Where, remember, even the great General Washington chose to starve his enemies rather than attack them, even though he did outnumber them by two to one. And we face at least the same odds, Jimmy, and who knows how many more rebels will swarm out of Richmond to support Magruder’s lines? It’s a desperate task, desperate! You see now why we need another report from your friend?” Pinkerton still did not know Adam’s identity and had abandoned his attempts to prise the name out of James. Not that James’s reticence in any way disappointed Pinkerton, who regarded James’s appointment as a brilliant success, for the lawyer had brought the Secret Service Bureau some desperately needed organization.

  James sat unhappily at his table. He was unconvinced by Pinkerton’s mathematics and knew that had this been a Massachusetts courtroom and Pinkerton a hostile witness, he would have enjoyed picking at that farrago of dubious assumptions and unlikely arithmetic, but now he forced himself to suppress his doubts. War made all things different, and Pinkerton, after all, was Major General McClellan’s personal choice as Secret Service chief and presumably understood these matters in a way that was impossible for James to comprehend. James still felt himself to be a military amateur and so patriotically hushed his doubts.

  Pinkerton turned as a buggy came rattling over the rail lines that lay between the house and the Alexandria quays. The buggy’s horses pricked their ears and showed the whites of their eyes as a locomotive hissed a sudden gust of steam, but the driver calmed the beasts down as he hauled on the reins. Pinkerton recognized the buggy’s driver and passenger and waved a hand in greeting. “It’s time,” he told James mysteriously, “for desperate measures.”

  The two men climbed down from the buggy. They were young men, both clean-shaven, both dressed in civilian clothes, but otherwise as different as chalk and cheese. One was tall with lank fair hair falling over a thin and rather melancholy face, while the other was short an
d rubicund, with tightly curled black hair and a cheerful expression. “Bulldog!” the smaller man exclaimed as he ran up the verandah steps. “It’s grand to see you again, so it is!”

  “Mr. Scully!” Pinkerton was equally delighted to greet his visitors. He embraced Scully, then shook the other man’s hand before introducing both to James. “Be pleased to meet John Scully, Major, and Price Lewis. This is Major Starbuck, my chief of staff.”

  “It’s a grand day, Major!” John Scully said. He had an Irish accent and a quick smile. His companion, altogether more reserved, offered James a limp handshake and a reserved, almost suspicious nod.

  “Mr. Scully and Mr. Lewis,” Pinkerton declared with palpable pride, “have volunteered to travel south.”

  “To Richmond!” Scully responded happily. “I hear it’s a grand wee city.”

  “It smells of tobacco,” James said, really for want of anything else to say.

  “Like myself, eh, Bulldog?” Scully laughed. “A right wee tobacco stinker I am too, Major. The last woman I took to bed said she didn’t know whether to make love to me or smoke me!” Scully laughed at this display of his own wit, Price Lewis looked bored, Pinkerton beamed with delight, and James struggled not to show his shocked disapproval. These men, after all, were about to attempt something extraordinarily brave, and he felt he should endure their coarseness.

  “Major Starbuck is a God-fearing churchman.” Pinkerton had detected James’s embarrassment and offered the explanation to John Scully.

  “As I am myself, Major,” Scully assured James hurriedly, and matched action to words by making the sign of the cross. “And if I made a confession, doubtless I’d be told what a wicked boy I’ve been, but what the hell? You have to make a laugh or two, don’t you, or else you’ll end up with a face as miserable as this Englishman here.” He grinned good-naturedly at Price Lewis, who pointedly ignored the jibe and watched the New Jersey soldiers file on board the transatlantic steamer instead.