Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Proud of you, boys! Proud of you!” the Major shouted dry-mouthed, then yelped as a pain like a sledgehammer’s hit struck his left arm. He stared in disbelief at the blood that suddenly dripped thick from his sleeve. He tried to move his hand from under the dripping blood, but only his little finger would move, so he crooked his arm upright, and that stopped the dripping blood. He felt oddly faint, but dismissed the sensation as unworthy. “You’re doing well, boys, real well!” His voice lacked conviction and blood was puddling in the elbow of his sleeve.

  The rebels were at the abatis now, using it as a breastwork for their rifles. Some men began dragging parts of the barricade aside, while others discovered the gaps left for the pickets and darted through. Puffs of smoke appeared from the rebel lines and were shredded away. The New Yorkers were going back faster now, panicked by the sight of the gunners who were abandoning their mired cannon and fleeing on the backs of their team horses. One artillery officer stayed and tried to spike the weapons by hammering soft metal nails into their touchholes, but he was first shot, then bayoneted by a rebel who eagerly rifled his victim’s pockets.

  The Major at last managed to put a tourniquet above his left elbow. His horse trotted unguided through the regiment’s tents, which were still immaculate from the morning inspection. The tents’ side flaps and doors were all properly brailed up, the groundsheets were swept, and the men’s bedding was folded neatly. Campfires burned. On one a pot of untended coffee boiled away. Playing cards fluttered in the wind. The rebels were coming on faster now and the New Yorkers began running for the shelter of the tree line behind their camp. Somewhere beyond those trees, around the road junction where seven tall pine trees stood in an isolated clump, there were more northern troops and larger gun redoubts and a sturdier abatis. That was where salvation lay and so the Yankees fled and the Confederates took over their camp with its treasure troves of food and coffee and comforts sent by loving families to men engaged upon the great and sacred business of holding the union together.

  Four miles away, on a glutinous mud road that stretched between gloomy woods, General Huger’s division waited while its commanding officer tried to determine just where he was supposed to be. Some of his men were entangled with the rear units of General Longstreet’s division and were further confused because Longstreet had just ordered his brigades to about turn and march back the way they had come. The muggy warm air played tricks with the sound waves, sometimes muffling them so the battle seemed to be miles away and at other times making it seem as though the conflict had moved farther east. The two divisions that should have closed like steel jaws on the Yankee army milled in bad-tempered confusion while General Johnston, oblivious that his wings had become entangled and ignorant that his center had started an attack without them, waited at the Old Tavern for the arrival of Longstreet’s troops. “Do we have any news of Longstreet?” the General asked for the twentieth time that hour.

  “None, sir,” Morton said unhappily. Longstreet’s division had vanished. “But Huger’s men are advancing,” Morton said, though he did not like to add that they were advancing so slowly that he doubted any of them would reach the battlefield before nightfall.

  “There’s going to be a full inquiry into this, Morton,” Johnston threatened. “I want to know who disobeyed what orders. You’ll arrange it.”

  “Of course, sir,” Morton said, though the chief of staff was more concerned by the rumble of gunfire that sounded from the direction of Hill’s division. The rumble was not loud, for once again the layers of warm and sultry air were baffling the sound waves so that the battle’s nearby clamor was being muted to the timbre of far-off thunder.

  Johnston dismissed his chief of staff’s fears about the muffled sound. “An artillery duel on the river,” he suggested. “Hill wouldn’t attack without support. He’s not a fool.”

  Six miles away, in Richmond, the sound of the guns was much clearer, echoing through streets washed clean by the night’s cloudburst. People clambered to rooftops and church belfries to get a view of the gunsmoke rising from the eastern woods. The President had not been informed that any battle was imminent and sent plaintive messages to his army’s commander demanding to be told what was happening. Were the Yankees attacking? Should the government’s reserves of gold be loaded on the waiting train and carried south to Petersburg? General Robert Lee, as ignorant of Johnston’s intentions as President Davis, advised the President to be cautious. It would be better to wait for news, he said, before starting another evacuation panic in the capital.

  Not everyone waited nervously for news. Julia Gordon distributed New Testaments in Chimborazo Hospital while across town, in Franklin Street, Sally Truslow used the absence of clients to organize a thorough spring cleaning of the whole house. Sheets were scrubbed and hung to dry in the garden, drapes and rugs were beaten free of dust, delicate glass light shades were washed clean of lampblack, wooden floors were waxed, and windows were polished with newspapers soaked in vinegar. In midafternoon a teamster’s wagon brought the great round mahogany table that would be the centerpiece of Sally’s seance room, and that had to be waxed. The kitchen steamed with vats of hot water and smelt of lye and washing soda. Sally, her arms and hands reddened, her hair pinned up and her face glistening with sweat, sang as she worked. Her father would have been proud of her, but Thomas Truslow was fast asleep. The Faulconer Brigade was held in reserve, guarding the Chickahominy crossings northeast of the city where the men listened to the noise of distant battle, played cards, pitched horseshoes, and counted their blessings that their presence was not required this day upon the killing ground.

  Starbuck rode south and west, following the road that led to the nearest crossing of the Chickahominy. He hardly knew where he was going, or what he could do. De’Ath had been his sponsor, his protector, and now Starbuck was on his own. For days Starbuck had been terrified that a genuine message from Adam might reach James and thus unmask his treachery, but he had never anticipated this danger, that he would be left friendless on the wrong side of the battlelines. He felt like a hunted animal driven from cover, then he remembered the document that Pinkerton had just given him and wondered if there was enough power in that scrap of paper to see him safe home to the Legion. He was sure that was where he wanted to go, but now he would have to prise the Legion’s ranks open without de’Ath’s help, and that prospect made him feel close to despair again. Perhaps, he thought, he should just volunteer for a northern infantry regiment. Change his name, pick up a rifle, and so disappear into the blue ranks of America’s biggest army.

  Starbuck’s horse ambled along the verge while its rider tried to find some hope in the whirl of fear and fancy that assailed him. The road had been cut and churned into a morass of deep red mud while the ruts left by the wheels of guns and wagons had filled with stormwater that now rippled under the wind. The countryside here was flat farmland interrupted by swaths of forest and stretches of bog amid which slow streams meandered between rushes, though not far ahead there were low hills that promised firmer footing for his borrowed horse.

  The cannon fire was incessant now, suggesting that one side or the other was making a determined effort to dislodge its enemy, yet even so there was remarkably little urgency being displayed in the camps that were uncomfortably pitched in these wet meadows. Men idled away the afternoon as though the battle across the river belonged to some other army or some other nation. A line of soldiers waited at a sutler’s store to buy what small luxuries the merchant offered, and a still larger line trailed away from a tent that advertised dried oysters. One of the men winked at Starbuck and tapped his canteen, suggesting that the oyster seller was, in truth, offering illicit whiskey. Starbuck shook his head and rode on. Maybe he should run away? Go to the badlands in the west? Then he remembered Sally’s scorn and knew he could not just cut and run. He had to fight for what he wanted!

  He passed a Baptist church that was being used as a hospital. Parked beside the church was an undertaker’s enca
mpment with its owner’s slogan painted in raw vermillion letters on the canvas hood of a covered wagon: “Ethan Cornett and Sons, Newark, New Jersey, Embalming, Cheap and Thorough, Warranted Free of Odor and Infection.” A second wagon was piled with pine caskets, each one labeled with the address to which it must be delivered. The embalmed corpses would be taken home to Philadelphia and Boston, Newport and Chicago, Buffalo and St. Paul, and there buried to the accompaniment of sobbing families and the high-flown rhetoric of bloodthirsty parsons. Most bodies were buried where they fell, but some men, dying in hospital, paid to have their corpses carried home. Even as Starbuck watched, a body was brought out of the church and laid on a table beside one of the embalmer’s tents. The toes of the corpse’s stockings had been pinned together and a label was tied to one ankle. A shirtsleeved man wearing a stained canvas apron and carrying a broad-bladed knife came from a tent to inspect the new body.

  Starbuck urged the horse on through the rank smell of embalming chemicals, then up a slight gradient that climbed through a thick belt of woodland beyond which was a small poor farm with fields that had once been fenced with snake rails, though all that was left of the fences were zigzag traces in the grass, for the rails had been stolen for cooking fires. A log cabin sat by the road with a homemade Stars and Stripes hanging from the eaves of its sod roof. The stripes had been made of dark and light colored sacking, while the stars were thirty-four limewash blobs daubed onto a faded scrap of pale blue canvas. The log house was evidently home to a family of free blacks, for an old, white-haired Negro came out of the tiny cabin as Starbuck rode past. The man walked toward his vegetable patch carrying a fork that he hefted in salute to Starbuck. “Go give them hell, master!” he called. “Do the Lord’s work now, sir, you hear me, sir.”

  Starbuck raised a hand in silent acknowledgment. Ahead now he could see a sliding shiny stretch of river and beyond it, far beyond it, a great patch of smoke that looked as though a vast area of woodland was afire. That was the mark of a battle, and the sight of it made Starbuck check his horse and think of K Company, and he wondered if Truslow was under that smoke, and if Decker and the Cobb twins and Joseph May and Esau Washbrook and George Finney were fighting there. God, he thought, but if they were fighting he wanted to be with them. He inwardly cursed de’Ath for dying, then looked beyond the smoke, far beyond, to where a smear of darker vapor betrayed where the foundries and mills of Richmond pumped their noxious smoke into the windy sky, and that evidence of the distant city made him homesick for Sally.

  He took a cheroot from his pocket and scratched a match alight. He inhaled the smoke greedily. Putting the matches back into his pocket he felt the cigar shape of the oilskin packet that was his only weapon left. The paper inside would have to be his passport to the Legion, yet if the list of damning questions was found by a rebel provost it could mean the noose. Once again Starbuck felt a tremor of fear and the temptation to run away from both armies.

  “Do the Lord’s work now, master, go give them hell, sir,” the old black man said, and Starbuck turned, thinking it was to him that the old man had spoken again, but instead he saw another horseman spurring up the road toward him. A quarter mile behind that newcomer a group of northern cavalry were roweling their horses through the sticky red mud, the first sign of urgency Starbuck had seen this side of the Chickahominy River.

  He looked back to the battle smoke as a hard, percussive drum-roll of cannon fire rumbled cruel across the landscape. Then a half-familiar voice hailed him urgently and Starbuck turned back with a panicked start to realize he was in still more trouble.

  THE REBEL ATTACK STALLED AMONG THE ABANDONED tents of the New York regiment. It was not northern resistance that held up the advance, but northern affluence, for within the tents, which themselves were made from stout white canvas of a quality forgotten by the southerners, were boxes of food, knapsacks stuffed with good shirts, spare trousers, and proper leather shoes made to fit either the right or the left foot, unlike the square-toed Confederate-issue brogans which were rigid boxes of stiff leather that could be worn on either foot indiscriminately and promised equal damage to both. Then there were the parcels of food sent from loving northern homes: boxes of chestnuts, jars of green-pepper pickles, bottles of apple butter, paper-wrapped slabs of ginger cake, tins of fruitcake, cans of sugarplums, cloth-wrapped cheeses, and best of all, coffee. Real coffee. Not coffee adulterated with dried and ground goober peas, or coffee made from parched corn pounded into powder, or coffee made from desiccated dandelion leaves mixed with dried apple powder, but real fragrant dark coffee beans.

  At first the rebel officers tried to keep their troops moving through the snares of enemy wealth, but then the officers themselves became seduced by the easy pickings within the abandoned tents. There were fine hams, smoked fish, dried oysters, new butter, and fresh-baked bread. There were thick blankets and, in some tents, quilts that had been made by womenfolk for their hero sons and husbands. One quilt displayed a union flag on which a legend had been sewn in letters of golden silk. “Avenge Ellsworth!” the quilt read.

  “Who the hell’s Ellsworth?” a rebel asked his officer.

  “A New Yorker who got himself killed.”

  “That’s a habit of Yankees these days, ain’t it?”

  “He was the first. Got himself shotgunned when he tried to take one of our flags off a hotel roof in Virginia.”

  “Son of a bitch should have stayed in New York then, shouldn’t he?”

  In the officers’ tents there were fine German field glasses, family photographs framed in silver standing on folding hardwood tables, elegant traveling writing cases filled with engraved notepaper, leather-bound books, hairbrushes backed with polished tortoiseshell, fine steel razors in leather cases, boxes of Roussell’s Shaving Cream, well-thumbed stacks of intimate daguerreotypes of undressed ladies, stone jars of good whiskey, and bottles of fine wine stored in sawdust-filled crates. A Confederate major, coming across one such cache of bottles, fired his revolver into the chest so that the liquor could not tempt his men. The crate’s sawdust became discolored with wine as the heavy bullets drove down into the bottles. “Keep the men moving!” the Major shouted at his officers, but the officers were like the men and the men were like children in a toy store and would not be shifted on to the day’s proper business.

  In the battalion’s wagon park, behind the headquarters tents, a sergeant discovered a hundred brand-new Enfield Rifles packed in rope-handled crates stenciled with the rifle manufacturer’s name, “Ward & Sons, Birmingham, England.” The Enfield was a prized gun and a far more accurate and sturdy rifle than the weapon this regiment of rebels was using, and soon a clamor of men jostled about the wagon to get hold of one of the precious guns.

  Slowly the chaos was sorted out. Some officers and sergeants slashed the guy ropes of the tents, collapsing the canvas on the contents to persuade the men to abandon the plunder and keep pressing after the defeated Yankees. On either flank, where no campground served to delay the attack, the rebel lines already pushed on through a wide belt of woodland where windflowers, bloodroot, and violets blossomed, and then the attackers emerged into an open stretch of waterlogged grassland where the wind shivered the puddles and lifted the heavy flags of the Yankee troops who were making their stand just west of the junction where the three roads on which the rebel attacks were supposed to be advancing came together. The crossroads was marked by seven tall pines and two gaunt farmhouses, landmarks of this killing ground where Johnston had planned his annihilation of the Yankees south of the river.

  The crossroads was also protected by an elaborate earth-walled fort that was studded with cannon and crowned by old Glory on a staff made of a trimmed pine trunk. The approaches to the fort were traversed by abatis and rifle pits. It was here that Johnston had planned to surround the Yankees, first hitting them in the center, then breaking them from north and south and so driving them whimpering into the snake-haunted marshes of the White Oak Swamp, but instead one rebel divisi
on alone advanced from the trees. That division had already broken one northern line and now, across the wind-shivered morass, they saw a second line waiting beneath its bright flags and so the gray and brown troops began to scream their shrill, eerie yell of attack.

  “Fire!” a northern officer standing on the fort’s rampart called. The northern cannon slammed back on their trails. Shells burst in the far air, white smoke lancing scraps of white-hot steel down onto the rebel line. The minie bullets whistled over the marsh, striking home in misty sprays of blood. The colors fell and were lifted again as the rebels waded on through sodden ground.

  General Huger heard the renewed cannonade, but refused to translate it as a summons for urgency. “Hill knows his business,” he claimed, “and if he needed our help he’d have sent for us.” In the meantime he pushed a brigade cautiously down an empty road, claiming it was a reconnaissance in force. The brigade found nothing. Longstreet, meanwhile, frustrated first in one direction and then in the other, ordered his men to countermarch one more time. Both generals cursed the lack of maps and a drifting afternoon fog that was just thick enough to hide the battle’s telltale plume of gunsmoke that would otherwise have told them just where the baffling and muffled sound of guns came from.

  President Davis, frustrated by his commanding general’s silence, rode from Richmond toward the battlefield. He asked every officer he met what news there was, but no one knew what happened in the marshy fields south of the river. Even the President’s military adviser could not discover the truth. Robert E. Lee had no standing in the army’s affairs and could only surmise that an attack had been launched from the Confederate lines, though with what aim and with what success he could neither say nor guess. The President asked if anyone knew where Johnston’s headquarters was, but no one was certain of that either, but the President decided he must find Johnston anyway, and so his party worked its way eastward in search of news about a battle that flared into life again as Hill’s unsupported columns crashed into the Yankee’s hard-dug defenses around the seven pines.