Copperhead
Page 45
A troop of northern horsemen tried to turn the rebels back. Two hundred and fifty horsemen had been waiting for the southern infantry to emerge from the trees and now, in three lines with their sabers drawn, the cavalry charged at the ragged rebel formations. The horses’ hooves thumped the summer turf to make the whole hilltop shudder. The horses galloped, teeth bared and eyes white as a trumpeter sounded his challenge to the smoky sky and the guidon lance flags dipped into their killing slant. “Charge!” The cavalry commander drew the word out into one long, fine scream of defiance as he pointed his saber’s blade at the rebel troops just forty yards ahead.
“Fire!” An Alabama officer called the command and the rebel infantry fired a volley that tore the guts and glory from the northern cavalry. Horses screamed and fell, their hooves flailing in an evening air misted by blood. Riders were crushed, impaled on their own swords, killed by bullets. The second line of cavalry tried to swerve around the bloodied carnage of the leading rank.
“Fire!” A second volley crashed smoke and lead, this volley fired from the left flank, and the surviving cavalry were swatted sideways. Horses ran into other horses, men fell from saddles and were dragged along by stirrups. Others fell clear, only to be trampled by panicked horses.
“Fire!” A last volley pursued the fleeing handful of defeated horsemen who left behind a slaughteryard of dying horses and screaming men. The rebels swarmed over the horror, shooting the horses and looting the men.
Elsewhere on the plateau the rebels captured northern cannons still hot from the day’s battle. Prisoners, some wearing straw summer hats, were herded into groups. A captured northern flag was paraded up and down the victorious ranks, while in the swamp the wounded cursed and bled and called for help.
Starbuck climbed onto the hot barrel of a northern twelve-pounder. The gun’s venthole and muzzle were black with burned powder, black as the shadows that now stretched long across the wide hilltop. The fleeing northerners made a dark mass in the dying light. Starbuck looked for Adam, but knew he would never see one man among so many. A silver streak betrayed where the river curled between the darkening marshes beyond which the setting sun illuminated a northern balloon that wobbled slowly down toward its winch. Starbuck stared for a long while, then shouldered his rifle with its bloody, sticky butt and jumped to the ground.
That night the Legion ate Yankee victuals around a Yankee campfire. They drank Yankee coffee and listened to Izard Cobb play a tune on a Yankee violin. The Legion had taken a whipping. Captain Carstairs and four other officers were dead, so was Sergeant Major Proctor. Eighty more men were dead or missing, and at least that number were wounded.
“We’ll make eight companies instead of ten,” Bird said. He had taken a bullet in his left arm, but had refused to take much note of the wound once it had been bandaged.
“Do we know what we’re doing tomorrow?” Major Haxall of the Arkansas battalion had joined the Legion’s officers around their fire.
“God knows,” Bird said. He sipped at a captured flask of Yankee whiskey.
“Anyone seen Faulconer?” Haxall asked. “Swynyard, then?”
“Swynyard’s drunk,” Bird said, “and Faulconer is well on his way to being drunk, and even if he was sober he wouldn’t want to talk to anyone.”
“Because of Adam?” Captain Murphy asked.
“Yes,” Bird said. “I guess.”
“What the hell happened?” Murphy asked.
No one answered for a long time. A few of the men looked at Starbuck, expecting and wanting him to translate Adam’s behavior, but Starbuck said nothing. He was just hoping that his erstwhile friend had the strength to be a stranger in a strange land.
“Adam thinks too much.” Bird finally broke the silence. The firelight made the Colonel’s thin face look more gaunt than ever. “Thinking isn’t good for a man. It only confuses simple issues. We should make thinking illegal in our new and glorious country. We shall achieve the pursuit of happiness by abolishing education and outlawing all ideas that are deemed too difficult for the comprehension of snake-oil Baptists. In sublime stupidity will lie our nation’s true contentment.” He raised his flask in a mock toast. “Let us celebrate a notion of genius: legally imposed stupidity.”
“Happens I’m a Baptist,” Major Haxall said mildly.
“My dear Major, I am so sorry.” Bird was immediately contrite. He might love the sound of his own voice, but he could not bear the thought of hurting people he liked. “You will forgive me, Major?”
“I might do more than forgive you, Colonel, I might just try to lead you to acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior.”
Before Bird could even think of a suitable response a sudden blossom of red light suffused the whole southern sky. The great light grew and spread to illumine a vast tract of countryside, casting a lurid shadow almost to the edge of Richmond itself.
A moment later the sound of an explosion rolled across the land. It was a massive blast, and in its wake more explosions sounded and more fiery globes appeared, swelled, and died on the river’s far bank. A thousand signal rockets whipped up into the night, trailing sparks. Flames leaped from gargantuan fires and burning rivers snaked across the dark earth. “They’re destroying their supplies,” Bird said in a tone of wonderment. He, like every other rebel on the plateau, had stood to watch the far inferno. More explosions echoed across the land and more great lights burst into the night. “The Yankees are burning their supplies!” Bird exulted.
The northerners were setting fire to a summer’s worth of food and ammunition. Railroad wagons that had been fetched from northern depots and shipped to the peninsula were now put to the torch. All the massive shells, the two-hundred-pounders and the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound bombs that had been destined to tear apart the patchwork-quilt defenses of Richmond were detonated. The railroad bridge over the Chickahominy that had been destroyed and then rebuilt was now blown up again, and when the Yankees were sure that the bridge was gone into the dark waters they sent a train of burning ammunition cars at full speed toward the void. The locomotive plunged into the mud first, and after it a succession of exploding boxcars collapsed off the trestle and went on burning and exploding in the river’s marshy edges. All night long the fires burned, all night long the ammunition cracked its flashes across the sky, and all night long the destruction went on until, by the dawn’s gray light, there were no more Yankees left at Savage Station and no more supplies, just a great pyre of greasy smoke like the one the rebels had left at Manassas Junction three and a half months before. McClellan, still convinced he was outnumbered, was running south toward the James.
And Richmond was safe.
The Legion buried its dead, picked up its rifles, and followed the Yankees across the Chickahominy swamps. Somewhere ahead of the army a cannon cracked and a rattle of musketry sounded. “Pick up your feet!” Starbuck snapped at his new company that had been formed from the survivors of J and K companies. “Faster!” he shouted. “Faster!” Because far ahead of the tired men the gunsmoke had once again begun to rise, the sure sign of death on a summer’s day and a pyre to beckon them onward.
Because they were soldiers.
HISTORICAL NOTE
THE BATTLE OF BALL’S BLUFF WAS A DISASTER FOR the North, not for its casualties, which were slight compared to the bloodlettings that were to come, or because of the battle’s strategic effects, which were minimal, but rather because the Congress of the United States was prompted by the disaster to institute a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, and anyone at all conversant with the ways of the U.S. Congress will not be in the least surprised that the committee became one of the most obstructive, ill-informed, and inefficient institutions of the northern government.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, who survived to become one of the more celebrated justices of the United States Supreme Court, was indeed grievously wounded at Ball’s Bluff. He recovered sufficiently to be back with his unit during McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign. He was to be
wounded twice more during the war.
Whether McClellan could have ended the war by a successful attack on Richmond in the early months of 1862 is, of course, a moot point. What cannot be disputed, however, is that the North lost its finest early chance to inflict a severe blow on the rebellion in those months, and it lost it through McClellan’s pusillanimity. He constantly overestimated the numbers of the rebels opposing him, thereby justifying his own caution. His own men, perversely, worshipped him, considering him, in the words of one of them, “the greatest general in history.” This was a judgment with which McClellan would undoubtedly have agreed, though he took great care not to test the reputation unless battle was forced on him, and when it was he usually contrived to be many miles away from the fighting. He marched his army to within six miles of Richmond, then marched away as soon as he was seriously challenged. Robert Lee then took the initiative so successfully that within two months the great northern invasion of the peninsula was but a memory. McClellan’s opinion of Lee, quoted in Copperhead, is genuine; Lee, McClellan wrote, “is wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility, and is likely to be timid and irresolute in action.”
The scene of the fighting at Ball’s Bluff can be found just north of Leesburg in Virginia, off U.S. Route 15. The smallest National Cemetery in the United States is there, close to where the hapless Senator Baker was killed. A stone marks that supposed spot. The place is still relatively uncharged, and a happy local legend insists that a Confederate ghost can be seen in the shadows of twilight.
The scenes of the bigger battles near Richmond are mostly well-preserved (though not, alas, Seven Pines, which is known to northerners as the battle of Fair Oaks) and are best seen by following the battlefield routes that start from the Historical Center in Richmond’s Chimborazo Park. The fort on Drewry’s Bluff is well worth a visit. The battle described in Copperhead’s epilogue is Gaines’ Mill, and the destruction of the northern supplies at Savage Station really did happen.
I could not have written Copperhead without Stephen W. Sears’s marvelous account of the Peninsular Campaign, To the Gates of Richmond, and readers who want to know where the events in the novel coincide with the actuality of history could do no better than read Sears’s work. Many of the characters in Copperhead are drawn from history, including all the general officers except, of course, Washington Faulconer. General Huger really did sleep late on the morning of Seven Pines and had no idea a battle was to be fought until Longstreet, advancing on the wrong road, informed him of Johnston’s plans. Micah Jenkins’s brigade really did tear a great hole in the northern army. John Daniels, editor of the Richmond Examiner and author of the South’s most infamous pamphlet on slavery, was a real person, as was Timothy Webster, who died as the novel describes. The Englishman Price Lewis and the Irishman John Scully were lucky not to share Webster’s fate. There is an unsubstantiated story that Scully’s admission of espionage was indeed tricked out of him by a man pretending to take his confession. Pinkerton existed, of course, and fed his master McClellan with the fantasies of rebel strength that justified McClellan’s innate timidity.
So, thanks to that timidity, the war is not over. The northern recruiting offices will soon reopen because, in Granny Lee, the South has discovered one of the great soldiers of all time. Rebellion is about to become legend, and near defeat will be turned into a series of dazzling victories and stunning reverses. The South, truly, has only just begun to fight, which means that Starbuck and Truslow will march again.
About the Author
BERNARD CORNWELL is a native of England, where he worked as a journalist in newspapers and television. In addition to Rebel, Copperhead, Battle Flag, and The Bloody Ground, the four novels in the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles, he also wrote the bestselling Sharpe series, featuring the adventures of Captain Richard Sharpe of the British Army in the wars against Napoleon, which has been dramatized for television by Masterpiece Theatre; the Warlord Chronicles, about Arthurian England; Stonehenge: 2000 B.C., a Novel; and The Archer’s Tale. A resident of the United States for fifteen years, Bernard Cornwell now lives with his American wife on Cape Cod.
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Praise for Bernard Cornwell’s
THE NATHANIEL STARBUCK CHRONICLES
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—San Jose Mercury News
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—Daily Telegraph
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“Highly successful.”
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BOOKS BY BERNARD CORNWELL
The Sharpe Novels
(in chronological order)
Sharpe’s Tiger
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Seringapatam, 1799
Sharpe’s Triumph
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803
Sharpe’s Fortress
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803
Sharpe’s Trafalgar
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805
Sharpe’s Rifles
Richard Sharpe and the French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809
Sharpe’s Eagle
Richard Sharpe and the Talavera Campaign, July 1809
Sharpe’s Gold
Richard Sharpe and the Destruction of Almeida, August 1810
Sharpe’s Battle
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Fuentes de Onoro, May 1811
Sharpe’s Company
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Badajoz, January to April 1812
Sharpe’s Sword
Richard Sharpe and the Salamanca Campaign, June and July 1812
Sharpe’s Enemy
Richard Sharpe and the Defense of Portugal, Christmas 1812
Sharpe’s Honor
Richard Sharpe and the Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813
Sharpe’s Regiment
Richard Sharpe and the Invasion of France, June to November 1813
Sharpe’s Siege
Richard Sharpe and the Winter Campaign, 1814
Sharpe’s Revenge
Richard Sharpe and the Peace of 1814
Sharpe’s Waterloo
Richard Sharpe and the Waterloo Campaign, 15 June to 18 June 1815
Sharpe’s Devil
Richard Sharpe and the Emperor, 1820-21
The Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles
Rebel
(Book One)
Copperhead
(Book Two)
Battle Flag
(Book Three)
The Bloody Ground
(Book Four)
Other Novels
Stonehenge: 2000 B.C., a Novel
The Archer’s Tale
Redcoat
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The right of Bernard Cornwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
COPPERHEAD. Copyright © 2006 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this tex
t may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007339488
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