Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  Where the guns grew hot as, fed by confusion and succored by pride, the killing kept on.

  The man who had hailed Starbuck was the French military observer, Colonel Lassan, who now spurred over the brow of the hill and seized the bridle of Starbuck’s horse, dragging him on down the road and so out of sight of the Yankee cavalry. “You know you’re in trouble?” the Frenchman asked.

  Starbuck was trying to jerk his horse’s head out of the Frenchman’s grasp.

  “Don’t be such a bloody fool!” Lassan snapped in his perfect English. “And follow me!” He let go of the bridle and pricked his horse’s flanks with his spurs, and such was the authority in his voice that Starbuck instinctively followed as the Frenchman swerved sharply right off the road and across a boggy patch of ground into the sudden cover of some broad-leaved trees. The two men forced a path through grasping undergrowth and low, soaking wet branches, at last reaching a clearer patch of woodland where the Frenchman turned his horse and raised a hand ordering Starbuck to silence.

  The two men listened. Starbuck could hear the solid, ear-thumping bang of big guns across the river, and the lighter, sharper crackle of musketry, and he could hear the rustle and moan of the wind in the high trees, but he could hear nothing else. Yet the Frenchman still listened and Starbuck looked with renewed curiosity at his rescuer. Lassan was a tall man, maybe in his forties, with a black mustache and a thin face made singular by the scars of war. Starbuck saw the scars where a Russian saber had laid open the Frenchman’s right cheek, a Cossack’s bullet had taken his left eye, and an Austrian rifle bullet had mangled his left jawbone, yet despite the injuries there remained such an air of confident enjoyment about the Frenchman that it was hard to call the horribly scarred face ugly. Rather it was superbly battered; a face on which life had left a tale of adventure that had been met with panache. Lassan rode his tall black horse with the same innate grace as Washington Faulconer, while his uniform, which had once been gaudy with lace and gold chain and gilt froggings, was now sun-bleached and darned, and its fine metal embellishments were either tarnished or missing altogether. He must once have had a splendid uniform hat, maybe in lustrous fur or shining brass and towering with plumes or a scarlet crest, but now he wore a floppy farm hat that looked as if it had come from a scarecrow. “It’s all right.” Lassan broke his silence. “They’re not following us.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The leader of the pack is a fellow called Thorne. Comes from Washington.” Lassan paused to pat his horse’s neck. “Claims to have evidence that you were sent across the lines to mislead the Yankees. Worse, that you were sent over to discover who their best spy in Richmond is.” Lassan took a compass from his pocket and let its needle settle before gesturing northwest. “We’ll go this way.” He turned his horse and started it at a walk through the trees. “What it boils down to, my friend, is that they want to measure your neck for a rope. I got involved because the energetic Thorne came to McClellan demanding the use of cavalry. I overheard, and here I am. At your service, monsieur.” Lassan offered Starbuck a rakish grin.

  “Why?” Starbuck demanded ungraciously.

  “Why not?” Lassan responded cheerfully, then went silent as his horse descended the bank of a small stream and scrambled up the far side. “All right, I shall tell you why. It’s just as I told you before. I need to get to the rebel side, simple as that, and preferably before this campaign is over, which means I can’t spend weeks traveling halfway around the damn world to get from Yorktown to Richmond. I prefer to make a run across the lines, and I guessed you’d be doing the same thing this afternoon and so I thought to myself, why not? Two heads are better than one, and when we get to the other side you will be my guarantor so that instead of arresting and shooting me as a spy they will accept your word that I am, indeed, Patrick Lassan, Chasseur Colonel of the Imperial Guard.” He grinned at Starbuck. “Does that make sense?”

  “Patrick?” Starbuck asked, his curiosity piqued by the name that did not seem at all French.

  “My father was English and his closest friend was Irish, and thus the name. My mother is French and I took her surname because she never found time to marry her Englishman, and what that makes me, mon ami, is a mongrel bastard.” Lassan had spoken with evident affection for his parents, an affection that made Starbuck envious. “It also makes me a bored mongrel bastard,” Lassan continued. “The Yankees are a fine, hospitable people, but they are increasingly beset by a Teutonic discipline. They wish to hedge me in with regulation and rules. They want me to stay a decorous distance from the fighting as befits an observer and not a participant, but I need to smell the killing, otherwise I can’t tell how this war is being won and lost.”

  “We have rules and regulations too,” Starbuck said.

  “Ah, ha!” Lassan twisted in his saddle. “So you are a rebel?”

  For a second the ingrained habit of the last weeks tempted Starbuck to a denial, then he shrugged. “Yes.”

  “Good for you. So maybe your rules and regulations are as bad as those of the Yankees, I shall see. But it will be an adventure, yes? A fine adventure. Come on!” He led Starbuck out of the trees and across a meadow that was being used as an artillery park. Another road lay ahead and beside it were ranks of resting Yankee infantry. Lassan proposed that if anyone challenged their presence he would explain that he was an official observer riding to the battle and that Starbuck was his orderly. “But our biggest obstacle is crossing the river. Your pursuers will stay on the road behind us, but there’s a chance they’ve telegraphed to all the bridges warning the sentries to keep a lookout for you.”

  Starbuck felt the sour pulse of fear in his belly. If the Yankees caught him they would hang him, and if the rebel provosts found Pinkerton’s paper then they would do the same. Yet by crossing the lines there was still a chance that he could bluff his way back into the Legion. “You’re taking a risk, aren’t you?” he asked Lassan.

  “Not at all. If they apprehend us I shall disclaim all knowledge of your criminal soul. I shall say you tricked and deceived me, then I shall smoke a cigar while you hang. Though don’t worry, I shall say a prayer for your soul.”

  The thought of his damned soul made Starbuck think of all his brother’s wasted prayers. “Did you see my brother?” Starbuck asked as he and the Colonel threaded the parked guns toward the infantrymen who rested by the road.

  “He was proclaiming your innocence. Your brother, I think, is not a born soldier.” It was a delicately kind judgment. “I spent most of the battle at Bull Run in your brother’s company. He’s a man who likes the confinement of rules and regulations. Not a rogue, I think. Armies could not survive without such careful men, but they need rogues even more.”

  “James is a good lawyer,” Starbuck said in his brother’s defense.

  “Why do you Americans take such pride in your attorneys? Lawyers are merely the symptoms of a quarrelsome society and every cent given to a lawyer is a sip less champagne, a woman unconquered, or a cigar unsmoked. Damn the bloodsucking lot of them, I say, though I’m sure your brother is a very angel compared to the rest. Sergeant!” Lassan shouted at one of the infantrymen, “what unit are you?”

  The Sergeant, persuaded by Lassan’s obvious authority, said that his unit was the 1st Minnesota in General Gorman’s brigade. “You know what’s happening, sir?” the Sergeant asked.

  “Damned rebels are twitching, Sergeant. You’ll be marching to give them a hiding soon enough. Good luck to you!” Lassan rode on, trotting between the road’s deep muddied ruts and the waiting infantry. “This is General Sumner’s Corps,” he told Starbuck. “Summer must have closed up to the bridge, which means he’s waiting for orders to attack, but I doubt he’ll get them very quickly. Our Young Napoleon doesn’t seem entirely seized of the day’s urgency. He’s ill, but even so he should be slightly animated.”

  “You don’t like McClellan?” Starbuck asked.

  “Like him?” The Frenchman considered the question for a mom
ent. “No, not much. He’s a drill sergeant, not a general. Nothing but a pompous little man with too high an opinion of himself. It wouldn’t matter if he could win battles, but he doesn’t seem capable of fighting them, let alone winning them. So far all he’s done in this campaign is lean on the rebels, using his weight to push them back, but he hasn’t fought them. He’s scared of them! He believes you’ve got two hundred thousand men!” Lassan gave a bark of laughter, then pointed up to a shiny telegraph wire that had been strung on makeshift poles alongside the road. “That’s our problem, Starbuck. Suppose our friend Thorne has telegraphed ahead, eh? They might be waiting for you at the bridge. They’ll probably hang you on the gallows in Fort Monroe. Last cup of coffee, a cigar, a quick trot through the Twenty-third Psalm, then they’ll put on the hood and wallop you down through the hatch. A quick way to go, they say. Much better than shooting. Have you ever seen a firing squad?”

  “No.”

  “You will. I’m always astonished how often a firing squad misses. You line the dumb buggers up at ten paces, pin a piece of paper over the poor man’s heart, and still they’ll pepper his liver and elbows and bladder; anywhere, in fact, that won’t put the poor bastard out of his misery, which means that the officer then has to go and give the quivering wretch a coup de grace in the skull. I’ll never forget my first. I had a hand shaking like a leaf and the poor bastard twitching like a landed fish. It took me three pistol bullets and a whole fortnight to get his blood out of the stitching in my boots. Messy business, firing squads. You feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Starbuck said, and in truth Lassan’s conversation was diverting him from his worries about de’Ath’s death.

  Lassan laughed at Starbuck’s aplomb. The road had entered a gloomy, dank stretch of forest where creepers trailed from trees and sour pools of water stretched under the branches. The road had been corduroyed, which made the going hard for the horses, so hard that after a while Lassan suggested they dismount and lead the horses by the reins. He talked of the Crimea and of the idiocy of generals, then of the days when he had joined the French army as an officer cadet in 1832. “My father wanted me to join the British army. Be a rifleman, he told me, best of the best, and my mother wanted me to be a French cavalryman. I chose the French.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was in love with a girl whose parents lived in Paris and I thought if I went to St. Cyr I’d be able to seduce her, while if I moved to England I should never see her again.”

  Starbuck thought of Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest of New Orleans, cheap actress and cheaper whore, who had tempted him to leave Yale and run away with a traveling band of showmen. He wondered where Dominique was now and whether they would ever meet to settle accounts with her. Then, quite suddenly, he realized he had no grudge against Dominique. She had only made him do what he had wanted to do, which was to flee from his family’s stultifying bonds. “What happened to the girl?” Starbuck asked.

  “She married a draper in Soissons,” Lassan said. “And now I can hardly remember what she looked like.”

  “Was your father angry?”

  “Only about my taste in women. He said he’d seen a prettier face on a bullock.” Lassan laughed again. “But I made my choice for love, you see, and I don’t regret it. And maybe if I’d chosen the other way I wouldn’t have regretted that either. There isn’t an optimum of life, just one hell of a good time waiting for those who have the courage to take it. And courage is what we must now have, mon ami.” Lassan gestured at the bridge that had just come into view. “Cross this bridge and we only have the bullets and shells of two armies to survive.”

  The bridge was a miserable-looking contraption. The mud-covered corduroy road led straight through a stagnant marsh, then seemed to elevate itself a foot or two above the mephitic, rank river before sliding down to another distasteful stretch of bog on the water’s southern bank. The slight elevation was caused by four pontoons, tin-covered wooden punts that carried the corduroyed roadway across the river. The pontoons were held in place by enormously long ropes that had been carried back to the forests and tied to trees, but it was evident that there was a problem with the complicated arrangement of ropes, pontoons, pulleys, and roadway. The storm of the previous night had raised the river’s level and brought down a mass of floating debris that had become trapped against the bridge, so stretching the mooring lines that the road now bulged dangerously downstream. There was plainly a danger that the pressure of water and flotsam would snap the lines and destroy the bridge, to prevent which disaster a score of unhappy engineer troops were standing up to their chests in the swirling, muddy water as they tried to clear the bridge and secure new mooring lines.

  “You can’t cross!” A shirtsleeved engineer accosted Lassan and Starbuck as the two men led their horses out from the cover of the forest. The engineer was middle-aged, his pants were smeared with mud, and his whiskered face dripped with sweat that had also turned his white shirt dark with damp. “I’m Colonel Ellis, Engineer Corps,” he introduced himself to Lassan. “The bridge isn’t safe. The storm gave it a hell of a beating.” Ellis gave Starbuck a glance, but showed no other interest in him. “There’s another bridge a mile upriver.”

  Lassan grimaced. “How do we reach this other bridge?”

  “Go back the way you’ve come. After half a mile there’s a turning to the left, take it. Another half mile there’s a T junction, turn left again.” Ellis slapped at a mosquito. Out in the river a line of men hauled on a cable and Starbuck saw the fragile bridge dip and quiver as the big rope tightened. The line came up from the water, looped with dripping vegetation, then one of the men in the river screamed as he saw a snake clinging to the newly tautened rope. He let go of the line and the panic spread to his fellows, who all released their grip and fled toward the bank. The bridge creaked as it surged downstream again.

  A sergeant bellowed at the troops, cursing them for chicken-livered bastards. “It’s only a goddamn moccasin! It won’t kill you! Now take hold! Haul, you bastards, haul!”

  “You know there’s a corps waiting to cross this bridge?” Lassan asked Colonel Ellis sternly, as though the Engineer Colonel was personally responsible for delaying the advance of the corps. “They’re waiting on the far side of the woods.”

  “They’re not crossing anything till the bridge is repaired,” Ellis said bad-temperedly.

  “I think we should discover for ourselves whether the bridge is safe,” Lassan said airily. “The future of the union might depend on it. In war, Colonel, there are risks that should be taken which would be unthinkable in peace, and if a fragile bridge is the only route to victory then it must be risked.” He declaimed this nonsense as he marched resolutely on toward the bridge, which was quivering under the force of the water’s onslaught. Starbuck could see how the stormwater had tugged two of the pontoons out of their alignment and as a result the corduroy road had fanned apart to reveal ankle-wide gaps between its top layer of logs.

  “Who are you?” The mud-spattered Engineer Colonel hurried after the Frenchman. Lassan ignored him, instead glancing into a small tent that was precariously pitched close to a stagnant pool and inside which a telegraph machine chattered unattended. “I demand to know who you are!” the Colonel, red-faced, insisted.

  “I am General Lassan, Viscount Seleglise of the Duchy of Normandy and a Chasseur of the Emperor’s Imperial Guard, presently attached to Major General George McClellan’s staff.” Lassan strode on with Starbuck beside him.

  “I don’t care if you’re the King of Siam,” Ellis insisted. “You still can’t cross.”

  “Maybe not, which means I shall die trying,” Lassan said very grandly. “If my body is recovered, Colonel, pray have it sent back to Normandy. My companion, on the other hand, is from Boston, so you may allow his body to rot in whatever noxious swamp it comes to rest. Come on, boy!” This last encouragement was to his horse, which was bridling nervously at the uncertain footing of the bridge’s approach. The co
rduroyed logs sank beneath the weight of the horses and a bubbling ooze of watery mud seeped up between the chinks.

  “Get the hell back!” the Sergeant, standing to his waist in water and with the bitter end of a rope in his hands, shouted at Lassan and Starbuck.

  “I’m going on. My risk, not yours!” Lassan called back to the Sergeant, then he gave Starbuck a mischievous grin. “Onward, ever onward!”

  “Colonel! Please?” Colonel Ellis tried a last appeal, but Lassan simply ignored the engineers and paced resolutely out across the logs to where the damaged bridge inched up above the river’s swirling, swollen, hard-running waters. The roadway creaked and dipped as they ventured onto the ramp. Starbuck, passing the first pontoon, saw that it was half flooded with rainwater, then he encountered the bridge’s inadvertent bend and his horse tried to shy away from the seethe of the water where it swirled against the driftwood and the pontoons. Starbuck dragged the horse on, but painfully slowly, for the beast needed time to place its hooves on the shaking logs. “Stay on the upstream side,” Lassan advised. “The logs are closer together.” The second pontoon was almost awash, and under the weight of Lassan’s horse the roadway dipped perilously close to the red muddy swirl of the river. “Colonel Ellis!” Lassan shouted back to the working party.

  “What is it?”

  “You’d find the work easier if you pumped the pontoons out.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own damn business!”

  “A good question,” Lassan said happily to himself. He and Starbuck were halfway across now, their weight depressing the heavy roadway to within inches of the river’s surface. “You have very good engineers in this country,” the Frenchman told Starbuck. “Better than ours. The French love being cavalrymen, at worst they will accept being turned into light infantrymen, but anything else is believed demeaning. Yet I have a horrible suspicion that future wars will be decided by the artillerymen and engineers, the mathematical drudges of warfare, while we splendid horsemen will be reduced to mere errand boys. Still, I can’t imagine good women falling in love with engineers, can you? That’s the good thing about being a cavalryman, it does make the important conquests of life somewhat easier.”