The Bloody Ground

by Bernard Cornwell

  "A map?" Blythe asked.

  "I want to see where Union is in Massachusetts, Tumlin. You kind of piqued my interest. I thought I knew half the back towns in Massachusetts on account of going with my father when he preached upcountry, but I sure as hell don't remember a Union. Where was it near?"

  "Hell, it weren't near nowhere!" Blythe was suddenly defensive. "It was a prison, remember. Maybe the Yankees made the name up?"

  "I guess that must be it," Starbuck said, content that he had unsettled his second in command, but as Tumlin moved away to find more congenial company Starbuck found himself wondering how many enemies he could afford to make in the Special Battalion. Case would kill him as soon as give him the time of day, and Starbuck suspected Dennison would do the same if he could ever summon up the courage. He could not depend on Cart-wright or Lippincott, who did their duty, but with a singular lack of enthusiasm. Potter was a friend, and Caton Rothwell too, but Starbuck's enemies far outnumbered his friends. He had experienced the same divide of loyalties in the Legion and Starbuck, reflecting on the schisms, feared it was because of his personality. He envied men like Colonel Elijah Hudson, the North Carolinian whose battalion had fought alongside the Legion at Manassas and whose men seemed united in affection for him. Or Pecker Bird, still recovering from his wound, who had inspired nothing but loyalty during his time as the Legion's commander. Then Starbuck noticed Old Mad Jack pacing up and down beside the busy guns. The General, as he so often did, was holding his left hand in the air as though he was testifying to God's goodness, though in truth he only held the hand in the odd position because otherwise, he believed, the blood would puddle around an ancient wound. Starbuck watched the General and thought that there was a man who made enemies as well as friends.

  Jackson chose that moment to glance up and catch Starbuck's eye. For a moment the two stared at each other with the uncomfortable sensation of recognition, but with nothing to say either, then Jackson made a growling sound as he lowered his left hand. "Have you found your Savior yet, Mister Starbuck?" he called, evidently recalling his last conversation with Starbuck.

  "No, General."

  Jackson veered toward Starbuck, trailing a gaggle of staff officers behind him. "But you are searching?" he inquired earnestly.

  "I'm thinking about something else right now, General," Starbuck said. "I was kind of wondering why a soldier makes enemies of his own side just by doing his duty."

  Jackson blinked at Starbuck, then frowned at the dirt beside his ungainly boots. He was plainly considering the question, and giving it hard thought, for he remained staring at the ground for what seemed like a full minute. One of his aides called to him, but the General flapped an irritated hand to show that he did not want to be disturbed, and when the aide called again he simply ignored the importunate man. Finally his fierce eyes looked up at Starbuck. "Most men are weak, Major, and the reaction of the weak to the strong is usually envy. Your job is to make them strong, but you cannot do that alone. Do you have a chaplain in your battalion?"

  Starbuck wondered if the General assumed he was still in command of the Legion. "No, sir."

  "Sir!" the aide called from beside the guns.

  Again Jackson ignored the man. "Sheep need shepherds, Major," he told Starbuck, "and greater strength comes from a man's faith than from his sinews. I am, God knows, the weakest of mortals!" This was proclaimed in the energetic voice of a man sure of his own soul, "but God has given me duties and granted me the strength to perform them."

  "Sir! Please!" the aide stepped closer to Jackson.

  Jackson, in a surprising gesture, touched Starbuck's arm. "Remember, Major," he said, " 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.' Isaiah."

  "Chapter forty," Starbuck said, "verse thirty-one."

  Jackson smiled. "I shall pray for you, Major," the General said, then turned to his aide and his smile vanished. "What is it?"

  The aide was carrying a pair of field glasses that he offered to the General. "The enemy, sir," he said, pointing down toward the beleaguered town, "is surrendering."

  "Cease fire! Cease fire!" It was the nearest battery commander who, lacking any orders, had decided to end the bombardment on his own authority.

  Jackson seized the field glasses, but even without their aid it was possible to see two Yankees walking with a white flag between the patches of smoke that drifted from the exploded shells. The Yankees were holding a grubby white flag hoisted on a pole. "It was a pitiful defense," Jackson growled angrily. "They should be ashamed of themselves." He hurried away, shouting for his horse to be fetched.

  "Cease fire!" another gun commander shouted. The rebel guns on the farther hills had still not seen the white flag and they went on firing until the signalers managed to wigwag their flags with the message about the enemy surrender, and so a silence gradually fell across the smoke-veiled, explosive-torn valley, though it was not a total silence, for out of the distant, heat-hazed north, from across the river and the faraway hills, came the sound of other guns. Someone was fighting hard, but who, or where or why, no one in Harper's Ferry knew.

  Belvedere Delaney was seeing his first battle and finding it far more terrifying than anything he could have imagined or feared. He had ridden to the range of hills that barred the Yankees' approach from the east and had arrived in time to witness McClellan's attack on the southernmost of the two passes that had been guarded by pitifully small numbers of rebel troops. Prudence would have dictated that the passes be more heavily manned, but Lee had gambled on McClellan's usual supine performance and so had stripped the defenders bare to add to the men assaulting Harper's Ferry. But McClellan was no longer supine. McClellan knew his opponent's mind and now he lunged to break the rebel army.

  To Delaney, watching from a high vantage point north of the pass, it seemed as though waves of blue-clad troops were washing up the wide valley like ocean waves running toward a beach. The foam of the breaking surf was the rill of smoke caused by exploding Yankee shells that crashed and flamed along the rebel defenses, while behind the smoke the long lines of blue infantry came remorselessly forward. Delaney was too far away to smell the blood or see the heavy coils of men's guts spewed across the summer grass, but the noise alone carried a violence that was almost unbearable. The crash of the guns was percussive, deafening, disorientating, and, worst of all, unending. How any man could live under that barrage was beyond Delaney's comprehension, yet live they did, and the occasional splintering crack of rifle volleys told him that some rebel units still fought back against the onrush of Yankees.

  The Yankee tide did not come forward smoothly, indeed, to Delaney, it often seemed inexplicably slow. He would watch a line of infantry advance under its flags and then, for no apparent reason, the line would stop and the men settle down. Another line would jerk forward while busy horsemen galloped in what seemed aimless errands between the advancing lines. Only the big guns never stopped, filling the shallow pass with smoke and noise and terror.

  Behind the pass, stretching out toward the gentler farmland of eastern Maryland, a mass of Federal troops was gathering. McClellan's army was crowding behind the attack ready to stream through the pass and ram their guns and rifles between Lee's scattered troops. To the west, behind the rebel lines, there was no such show of strength, only country roads carrying wagons of wounded back toward the unseen Potomac.

  "I guess our message got through," Delaney said to George.

  George, a handsome, light-skinned Negro, nodded. "Something stirred them," he agreed in an amused tone.

  Delaney, recalling his terror at being found out, felt an immense relief. He unstoppered a silver flask and drank from it, then handed the flask to George. "A toast to Northern victory, George."

  "To victory," George said, and tipped the flask to his lips. He savored the wine, then smiled. "You brought some of the '49 hock."

  "Only one bott
le."

  "A pity it isn't chilled," George said reprovingly. "When Richmond falls," Delaney said, "we shall bathe in chilled hock." "You might, not me."

  Delaney laughed. Rome, he was thinking, Rome was the place to go, or if Rome was pitching it too high, then perhaps Athens or Naples. He would be an ambassador for freedom in a place of suntouched beauty and decadent luxury. He would uniform George in a curled wig and a gilt-encrusted coat, and dine to the sound of a string quartet playing beneath heavy-scented flowers. By day he would lecture the natives on the arts of government and by night be lectured by them on the arts of decadence.

  Beneath him, struggling to make that dream come true, the blue lines suddenly surged forward. The rebels were breaking. Men who had fought and beaten Yankees on fields across Virginia were now tasting defeat. Their defenses were shredding and breaking. Small groups of men ran westward, some shrugging off equipment so they could run faster, while others were left dead or wounded on the shell-torn turf as the victorious Yankees swept across the captured positions. The surviving rebel guns were being limbered up and whipped away, their encampments were abandoned, and everywhere the Stars and Stripes came forward. "Time to go, George," Delaney said, watching the rout. "But to where? Richmond?"

  "Back to Lee, I think. I should like to be a witness of the bitter end," Delaney said. He thought there might well be a book in it. A tragedy, probably, for though Lee was his country's enemy, he was a good man, but Delaney doubted whether goodness was the quality that won wars; only might, hard resolve, and low treachery could do that. , Delaney turned his horse and cantered west. He had betrayed the Confederacy to McClellan and now prayed he would be a witness to its destruction.

  The Federal general who formally surrendered the Harper's Ferry garrison was splendidly uniformed in gold-braided blue with a shining scabbard hanging from his belt, while Jackson, accepting the great prize, was in a filthy homespun coat, shabby boots, and with his battered cadet cap crammed over uncut, dirty hair. Jackson, even in victory, looked grim, though he did allow himself a smile when Starbuck's hearse came into view. The vehicle was being pulled by the skirmishers of Potter's company, while Potter himself was riding on the box from where he cracked an imaginary whip. The Yankee General, still at Jackson's side, wondered for the hundredth time why McClellan had not come to the garrison's rescue and then, at the sight of the hearse, was overcome with mortification as he realized the utter shame of being defeated by such ragamuffin troops. None of the victorious rebels was better dressed than their general, and most were worse; indeed some of Jackson's men limped into the town on bare feet while the beaten Yankees were outfitted with the best products of the industrial north.

  Colonel Swynyard came hurrying down the column in search of Starbuck. "You can jettison your death-cart, Nate!" the Colonel called. "The town's crammed with wagons. New wagons, fine wagons. I've left young Coffman guarding a pair for you. Told him to shoot any rogue who dared lay a finger on them. And I daresay we can give most of your fellows rifles now, there must be thousands here! And food. It's like Manassas Junction all over again."

  For once again Jackson had captured a major Federal supply base, and once again his hungry, footsore, ill-dressed troops were given run of the North's largesse. Whoops of joy greeted each opened crate. Tinned meat was prized open with bayonets and real coffee set to boil on fires made from splintered crates that had carried brand-new rifles. Jackson's commissary officers did their best to see that the most needy units received the pick of the plunder, but the chaos was too great and the first arrivals grabbed most of the choice pickings. Starbuck's men were early enough to find some rifles, boots, food, and ammunition, but not enough for every man, yet Starbuck was able to give two of his four musket-carrying companies brand-new Springfield rifles still coated in their factory grease. The rifle locks were inscribed 1862 and were handsomely engraved with an American Eagle and "US Springfield." The hearse and one of the two wagons were loaded up with cartridges for the new rifles.

  Swynyard frowned at the hearse. "Are you sure you want to keep it?" he asked Starbuck.

  "The men like it. It makes them feel special."

  "I suppose it would," Swynyard said, then raised his head to listen to the far off sound of gunfire. "We're marching in the morning," he said grimly. "No rest for the wicked."

  "What's happening?"

  "Yankees are attacking," Swynyard said vaguely, then shrugged as if to say that he knew no more. "Lee wants us all together again. It'll be hard marching, Nate. Tell your fellows they have to suffer the blisters and keep going. Just keep going." The Colonel had a map that he unfolded to show Starbuck the route they would take. "We go up the southern bank of the Potomac," he said, tracing the westward road with a nail-bitten finger, "to a ford here, near Shepherdstown, then we march east as far as here." He tapped the map.

  Starbuck peered at the rendezvous, which was a town situated at a road junction just a few miles inside Maryland. "Sharpsburg," he said. The map showed a small town positioned on a wide strip of land formed by the Potomac River and one of its tributaries, Antietam Creek. "Sharpsburg," Starbuck said again. "Never heard of it."

  "You're sleeping there tomorrow night," Swynyard said, "God willing."

  "My men's feet willing, more likely," Starbuck said. He lit one of the captured cigars that Lucifer had discovered along with a haul of new underwear, shirts, sugar, and coffee. "Did we get any horses for the wagons?" he asked.

  "A few, none of them good." The Colonel folded his map. "Early start, Nate. Get some sleep."

  Getting sleep was easier said than done, for the men did not want to sleep. They had won a victory and the ease of that victory was cause for celebration and the Yankee supplies had yielded enough liquor to make that celebration rousing. Others, like Starbuck, wanted to look at the sights. They marveled at the captured cannons that were lined wheel to wheel in the armory yard and that would now take their place in the Confederate battle line, then they explored the engine house where John Brown had been surrounded with his hostages. The little firefighter's building had a handsome cupola, reminding Starbuck of the widow's walks on the houses beside the sea in Massachusetts, though this cupola, like the engine house's brickwork, was pitted by the scars made by the bullets of the US Marines who, under Colonel Robert Lee's command, had forced John Brown's surrender. Some rebels were all in favor of pulling the engine house down in case it became a Yankee shrine, but no one had the energy for the demolition and so the building remained intact. Starbuck climbed to the church flying the British flag to discover it was a Catholic building that had sheltered its parishioners beneath a neutral flag. A nearby church had been shelled to destruction, but the Catholic congregation had escaped the bombardment.

  The Yankee prisoners marched disconsolately out of the town, going to the heights where they would bivouac before being sent south to the prison camps. Harper's Ferry was left to its new owners who, as night fell, lit cooking fires that flickered low as men rolled themselves in blankets and slept on ground still littered with fragments of shell casing. Starbuck had made his quarters in an abandoned railroad box wagon, but he could not sleep and so he pulled on his boots and, careful not to wake Lucifer who, after nights of watching Starbuck, had at last fallen fast asleep, slipped out of the wagon and walked between his sleeping men toward the bank of the Shenandoah.

  He was bone tired, but he could not sleep, for the same fears that had prompted his morning conversation with Jackson were nagging at him. He felt presentiments of failure and suspected they sprang from within himself. He had failed to unite the Special Battalion, just as he had failed with the Legion. No battalion, he told himself, could fight well if it was riven with jealousies and hatred, but discerning the problem did not help him find a solution. It was true that he had made some allies in .the battalion, but they numbered fewer than half of the total, and many of the rest were bitter enemies. He thought about Elijah Hudson and Pecker Bird and Robert Lee and decided that their popularity
sprang from character, and if character was lacking, he chided himself, leadership was a hopeless ambition. Griffin Swynyard had changed his character through the grace of God and that had made all the difference; a once-hated major had become an admired colonel. Starbuck picked up a piece of rubble and tossed it into the river that here flowed fast and white over rocky outcrops to its junction with the Potomac.

  So was God the answer? Was there nothing he could do for himself? Starbuck, gloomier than ever, suspected that the ambition in his own soul was the flaw that revealed itself to his men. That and the cowardice that he saw in himself. Or perhaps Maitland was right, and some men were born to lead. Starbuck swore softly. Hs had a vision of a perfect battalion, one that operated as smoothly as the newly greased mechanism of the captured Springfield rifles. A machine that worked.

  Jackson had said that only God could give a man strength, and only strength could make a battalion work together. A battalion was composed of men with different fears and suspicions and ambitions, and the trick of it was to swamp those desires with a greater desire: the desire to work together toward victory. In a day or two, Starbuck feared, the Yellowlegs would face a real Yankee army, the same army that had made the northern horizon vague with smoke these last two days, and how would they fight then? Of the officers Potter alone was loyal, and Potter, God knew, was a weak reed. Starbuck closed his eyes. A part of him yearned for the grace of God to drench him with strength, but whenever he was tempted to yield to his Maker's will another temptation intervened, and this was a more beguiling temptation. It consisted of memories of firelit bodies, not dead and twisted and lice-ridden and scarred and filthy, but bodies on sheets. Sally pushing her hair back from her face. The girl who had died under Blythe's bullets at the tavern. He remembered her crouching by the fire, her red hair falling down her naked back, laughing as she toasted a scrap of bread on which she had melted a scrap of cheese taken from a mousetrap. Heaven, Starbuck liked to think, lay in those moments and he was unwilling to call them hell. His father had always said that being a Christian was not easy, but it had taken these last two years to show Starbuck how desperately hard it really was. He did not want to abandon sin, yet he feared that he would fail as a soldier if he did not. He wondered if he should pray. Maybe a prayer by this hurrying river would hurtle its way through the smoky air to the ear of God, who alone could give a man the strength to overcome temptation.