Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  The Frenchman sheathed his sword as he and Starbuck burst into a wide stretch of open country. To their right the rail embankment was topped by small groups of Yankees who were watching helplessly as a single rebel infantry brigade advanced boldly across the open heath. The brigade was composed of four battalions, three of which were flying the Confederacy’s new battle flag while the fourth still carried the old three-striped flag. The brigade was advancing in two lines without either artillery or cavalry support, yet nothing seemed able to stop their progress. In front of them was a chaotic mass of fugitives and behind them a litter of dead and dying men. No other rebels were in sight. It was as if this one brigade had found a gap in the Yankee line and had decided to win the battle on its own.

  Starbuck swerved toward the rebel brigade. “Virginia!” he shouted like a battle cry. “Virginia!” He waved to show he was unarmed. Lassan followed him, while sixty yards behind Lassan the northern cavalry burst out from beneath the trees.

  The rebel brigade had been the first of General Longstreet’s units to reach the battlefield, and its commander, Colonel Micah Jenkins, was just twenty-six years old. He had three battalions of South Carolinians and one of Georgians, and the four southern regiments had already torn through three Yankee positions. Jenkins had been ordered to attack, and no one had ordered him to stop, and so he was marching on deep into the Yankee rear. With a born soldier’s luck his brigade had struck the Yankee defenses where there were few guns and only scattered units of infantry, and one by one the northern positions had been overwhelmed and put to panicked flight. Now his men were threatened by a handful of blue-coated cavalry who had appeared on their left flank. A South Carolina captain wheeled his company a half turn to the left. “Make sure you’re loaded!” he called. “Aim for the horses!”

  Some of the Yankees knew what was coming and sawed on their reins. One horse, turning too quickly, lost its footing in the wet soil and spilled over. Another reared up, whinnying, tipping its rider back over his saddle’s cantle. But most of the Yankees whooped and galloped on, consumed with the fine frenzy of cavalrymen in full attack. Thirty horsemen had their sabers drawn, others carried revolvers. A bearded sergeant carried the guidon, a small triangular flag mounted on a lance shaft, and now he lowered the shaft’s razor-sharp spear point until it pointed straight at the heart of the South Carolina Captain.

  The Captain waited until the two strange fugitive horsemen were safely past his rifles, then he called the order to fire. Fifty rifles cracked.

  Horses screamed and fell into the mud. The guidon plunged point-first into a tussock and stuck there quivering while the Sergeant flailed back off the horse, blood spilling suddenly from his open mouth. A dozen horses were down in the mud and another dozen rode into the chaos of hooves and scrambling men. Horses screamed in pain. The surviving beasts would not charge through the tangle of blood and beating hooves, but swerved aside instead. A few riders fired their revolvers into the bank of rifle smoke, then spurred away before the infantry could reload. Colonel Thorne was among the fallen, trapped in the mud beneath his wounded horse. The Colonel’s left leg was broken and his fine dream of galloping across a smoky field to his country’s rescue was reduced to the stench of blood and the scream of wounded beasts and the receding thump of hooves as the other cavalry wheeled hard away. The South Carolina Captain wheeled his company back into line and marched on.

  Colonel Jenkins galloped across to the newcomers. “Who the devil are you?”

  “Captain Starbuck, Faulconer Legion, Virginia,” Starbuck panted.

  “Lassan, Colonel of the French army, come to see some fighting,” Lassan introduced himself.

  “You’ve sure come to the right place, Colonel. What’s up ahead?”

  “My official position as an observer forbids me to tell you,” Lassan said, “but my companion, if he had his breath back, would tell you there are two separate regiments of Yankee infantry, one in a clearing beyond the next stand of trees and the other a quarter mile beyond them. After that you hit their main defense works at the crossroads.”

  “Then we’d best keep going,” Micah Jenkins said, “and whip the bastards some more.” He looked at Starbuck. “You were a prisoner?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Then welcome home, Captain, welcome home.” He turned his horse and raised his voice. “On, boys, on! Roll the bastards back where they came from. On, boys, on!”

  Starbuck turned to look back at the left flank. A squad of rebel skirmishers had gone to put the wounded horses out of their misery and their shots sounded flat and low in the day’s gloom. The remnant of the Yankee cavalry had gathered by the far trees and now stood there impotent and watched while the infantrymen looted the saddlebags and pockets of the fallen riders. The southerners pulled Thorne’s horse off the Colonel, took his sword and pistol, then left him cursing their parentage. Still more horsemen emerged from the woodland, and Starbuck could see James among them. Poor James, he thought, and the guilt whipped though him like a bullet’s strike.

  “What is it?” Lassan asked, seeing the stricken look on Starbuck’s face.

  “My brother.”

  “You’re playing a game,” Lassan said brusquely. “He lost, you won, you’re both alive. There are thousands of men who will do worse than that today.”

  “I don’t want him to suffer.

  “How has he suffered?” Lassan asked. “The worst that will happen to your brother is that he will go back to his law practice, where he will spend the rest of his life telling his colleagues about his wastrel brother, and do you think he won’t be secretly proud of you? You’re doing all he would never dare, but would secretly like to do. Men like him need brothers like you, otherwise nothing would ever happen in their lives. My mother used to tell my sister and me one thing over and over again. Geese, she would say, go in gaggles, but eagles fly alone.” Lassan grinned mischievously. “None of that may be true, mon ami, but if the notion helps your conscience then I would cling to it as though it were a warm woman in a deep bed on a cold night. Now stop feeling guilty and look for a weapon. There’s a battle to fight.”

  Starbuck looked for a weapon. He was back under his chosen flag with a battle to fight, a noose to escape, and a friend to betray. He picked up a fallen man’s rifle, found some cartridges, and looked for a target.

  Northern reinforcements finally began crossing the rain-swollen river. The weight of a field gun broke the damaged bridge, though miraculously neither man nor weapon was lost. Instead the team horses were whipped bloody until they dragged the heavy gun out of the water and up to the corduroyed road on the southern bank.

  McClellan stayed in bed, dosing himself with quinine, honey, and brandy. He had taken so much medicine that he was dizzy and beset with headaches, but his doctor confirmed to the headquarters staff that the fevered General was aware that a battle was taking place, but claimed the patient was in no fit state to take command of the army. Tomorrow, perhaps, the Young Napoleon would be able to impose his granite will upon the battlefield, but till then he must rest and the army must manage without his guiding genius. The General’s staff tiptoed away lest they disturb the great man’s recovery.

  General Johnston, waiting at his headquarters at the Old Tavern north of the railroad, had at last learned that the muffled noise of the guns was not an artillery duel, but rather a battle that had been raging without either his knowledge or his direction. General Longstreet had arrived at the Old Tavern to confirm that the first of his troops were now attacking south of the railroad. “I’ve lost Micah Jenkins,” he told Johnston, “God only knows where his brigade is by now, and as for the rest, Johnston, they’re exactly like virgins.”

  Johnston could have sworn Longstreet had said his men were like virgins. “They’re like Virginians?”

  “Like virgins, Johnston, virgins! Nervous of their flanks.” Longstreet grinned. He was full of an excitable, quick energy. “We need an attack here”—he tapped a grimy fingernail on Johnsto
n’s map—“north of the rails.”

  Johnston rather believed he had given Longstreet specific orders to make just such an attack north of the rails, and that those orders had demanded the attack should have been made at dawn rather than now when the day was already dying. God only knew what had gone wrong with his careful three-pronged assault, but something had bent it dangerously askew and tomorrow, Johnston swore, he would find out exactly why it had gone awry and who was responsible. But that inquiry must wait for victory and so he curbed his normally sharp tongue and instead sent an order for one of the reserve divisions to attack on the northern side of the railway embankment.

  The new attackers marched past the Old Tavern, and Johnston, fretting to know exactly what was happening on the battlefield, joined the advancing troops. As he rode forward he wondered just why everything in this army seemed so needlessly complicated. It had been the same at Manassas, he reflected. At that battle the rebel headquarters had waited ignorant on the right while a battle flared on the left, while here he had waited on the left as a battle flared ungoverned on the right. Yet still he might pluck victory from chaos if only the Yankees had not sent too many reinforcements across the Chickahominy.

  President Davis arrived at the Old Tavern to discover that General Johnston had gone eastward. Johnston’s second-in-command, Gustavus Smith, who had been New York’s street commissioner before the war, professed himself uncertain about the day’s events, but delivered the broad verdict that everything seemed dandy as far as he understood, though he admitted his understanding did not stretch very far. General Lee, accompanying the President, was embarrassed by such a reply from a fellow soldier and shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. The tavern keeper brought the President a glass of sweetened lemonade that Davis drank on horseback. In the distance Davis could see the two yellow balloons of the Federal army’s Aeronautical Corps wobbling precariously in the gusting wind. “Is there nothing we can do about those balloons?” Davis asked testily.

  There was silence for a moment or two, then Lee quietly suggested that cannons did not have the necessary elevation and that the best answer might be high-powered sharpshooter rifles to make the lives of the gondola’s occupants uncomfortable. “Even so, Mr. President, I doubt such rifles will have the necessary range.”

  “Something should be done,” Davis said irritably.

  “Eagles?” General Smith observed brightly. Both Lee and Davis looked at him quizzically and Smith hooked his fingers to demonstrate the action of a bird’s claws. “Trained eagles, Mr. President, might well be persuaded to puncture the balloons’ envelopes?”

  “Quite so,” Davis said, astonished. “Quite so.” He glanced at his military adviser, but Lee was staring into a puddle as though, somehow, the answer to the Confederacy’s problems might be found in its murky depths.

  While out in the fields the guns banged on.

  “On! On! On! On! On!” Micah Jenkins seemed to know only how to hurl his men forward. He ignored his own casualties, leaving them in the field behind while he chivvied and encouraged and inspired his men to keep advancing. They were deep inside Yankee territory now, without any other southern troops to support them, but the young South Carolinian did not care. “On! On!” he shouted. “No stopping now! Give the bastards hell. Come on, drummers! Let me hear you! Keep marching!” A bullet whistled within an inch of Jenkins’s cheek, the wind of its passing like a small, warm slap. He saw a puff of smoke drifting away from the bushy top of a pine tree and he spurred forward to one of his marching companies. “See the smoke? The pine tree, there! To the left of the hawthorn. There’s a sharpshooter up in the branches; I want the bastard’s wife widowed this instant!”

  A dozen men knelt, aimed, and fired. The tree seemed to shiver, then a body slumped into view, held in place by the rope that had tied the northern marksman to the tree. “Well done!” Jenkins shouted, “well done! Keep marching!”

  Starbuck had collected a Palmetto rifle, a haversack of cartridges, and a gray uniform jacket from the corpse of a dead South Carolinian. The jacket had a small bullet hole in its left breast and a big, bloody rent in the back, but it still made a better uniform than his dirty shirt. Now he fought like a mounted infantryman, loading and firing from horseback. He rode just behind Jenkins’s front line, caught up in the mad daring of this lunge that had carved its bloody hook deep into the Yankee rear. The main battle still thundered to the brigade’s right, but that battle seemed like a quite separate action from this inspired South Carolinian charge.

  The rebels marched in line across a road, throwing down the snake fence at its far side before moving into a belt of trees. The dead Yankee sharpshooter dripped blood from his tether at the top of the pine tree. His rifle, an expensive target model with a heavy barrel and a telescopic sight, had fallen to lodge in one of the lower branches from where it was retrieved by a jubilant Georgian who caught up with his comrades just as they emerged from the belt of trees to face yet another battalion of northern infantry. The northerners had just been ordered to their feet when the rebels burst from the trees. Micah Jenkins roared at his men to hold their fire and just charge. “Scream!” he shouted. “Scream!” And the ulullating rebel yell began again.

  The Yankee line disappeared behind its own bank of gunsmoke. Bullets whistled past Starbuck. Confederates were down, gasping and kicking on the grass, but still the gray line surged forward with Jenkins whipping it mercilessly on. “Leave the wounded! Leave them!” he shouted. “On! On! On!” The Yankees began reloading, their ramrods showing spiky above their two ranks, but then the banshee yell of the attackers and the glimmer of bayonet steel in the smoke convinced the northerners that this day was lost. The battalion broke and fled. “Follow them! Follow!” Jenkins shouted and the tired rebels swarmed into the woodland where they opened fire on the fugitives. Some Yankees tried to surrender, but Jenkins had no time for prisoners. The northerners had their rifles taken and were then told to make themselves scarce.

  One more Yankee battalion waited at the wood’s far edge and they, like all the other northern regiments that Jenkins’s brigade had faced that afternoon, were unsupported by any other northern infantry. The first they knew of a rebel assault was when fleeing Yankees appeared among the trees, but before the Colonel could organize his defense, the rebels were in sight, whooping, yelling, and screaming for blood. The Yankees fled, pouring back across an open wheat field toward the crossroads where the bulk of their army had checked the strong central thrust of the rebels’ main attack. And now, in sight of that larger battle, Micah Jenkins stopped his men.

  The brigade had come deep into the Yankee rear, but to go farther was to invite annihilation. In front of them now there stretched an open plain crammed with tents, wagons, limbers, and caissons, while to their right was the crossroads by the two shell-riddled farmhouses and the seven bullet-shredded pine trees. It was there, by the rifle pits and the big redoubt, that the day’s main battle raged. The main Confederate attack had stalled in front of the redoubt where the Yankees were putting up a solid defense. Cannon fire scorched the wheat and mowed down rebels. It was there that Johnston had planned to catch the stubborn Yankee defense in the pincers of his flank attacks, but the flank attacks had never happened and the central thrust was being bloodied and decimated by the northern gunners.

  Except, by chance, Micah Jenkins’s twelve hundred men were now in the Yankee rear. The brigade had started with nineteen hundred men, but seven hundred lay dead or wounded in the path of chaos that the South Carolinian had carved across the battlefield. Now he had a chance to make more chaos.

  “Form line!” Jenkins shouted and waited while his second line of men caught up with the first. “Load!”

  Twelve hundred rebels in two ragged ranks rammed minie balls on powder charges. Twelve hundred percussion caps were fumbled onto firing cones and twelve hundred hammers pulled back.

  “Take aim!” Not that there was anything particular to aim at. No enemy were immediately confronting Jen
kins’s brigade; instead the rebel soldiers faced a wide field of Yankee encampments under a wind-fretted sky of smoky clouds. The rebel flags were hoisted high behind the line, the Palmetto flags of South Carolina and the three-pillared seal of Georgia, and above them all the crossed stars of the Confederacy’s battle flag. Six enemy flags lay on the grass by Jenkins’s horse, all captured in the charge and held now as trophies to be sent to his parents’ plantation on Edisto Island.

  Jenkins raised his saber high, paused for a heartbeat, then swept the curved blade down. “Fire!”

  Twelve hundred bullets whipped across the damp evening fields. The volley did little physical damage, but its massive splintering crack announced to the northerners that there were rebels deep in their rear, and that realization was enough to start the retreat from the Seven Pines crossroads. One by one the Yankee guns were dragged out of the redoubt, then the infantry battalions began to back away from their parapets. Rebel yells whooped in the gloom and Starbuck saw a gray line of men swarm through the long shadows toward the earthen fort. A last northern gun fired, hurling a knot of attackers back in a mist of blood, then a flood of bayonets was carried up and over the sandbagged parapets, and suddenly the wheat field in front of Micah Jenkins’s brigade was dark with panicked men streaming eastward. The Yankees were abandoning their tents, their artillery, and their wounded. Horsemen galloped among the fugitives who ran toward the night, leaving the two houses and the shattered pines and the bloody redoubt to the rebels.