The Bloody Ground

by Bernard Cornwell

  A stone slid on stone to Starbuck's right. He opened his eyes and saw a shadow flicker among the rubble and stunted trees on the riverbank. "Who's there?" he called.

  No one answered. He decided it must have been a rat, or else one of the rake-thin cats that lived wild in the ruined armory. The lights of the town showed through trees, but they revealed nothing on this broken riverbank where weeds grew thick among fallen stones. He turned back to the water. Maybe, he thought, he should pray. Maybe he should claw and crawl his way back to God, but where would that journey end? On the Yankee side? On his knees to his father?

  A click sounded and he knew it was a gun being cocked. For a second he froze, hardly daring to believe what he suspected, then he threw himself backward just as a gun flamed and banged to his right. The shot screamed over his head and a billow of smoke gusted across the water. He scrambled into a half-choked culvert that was brimming with scummy water and he dragged the Adams revolver from his holster. He heard footsteps, but could see no one. A sentry was shouting, demanding to know who had fired and why, then Starbuck saw a shape silhouetted against the tree-shrouded lights of the town and he leveled the revolver. Then a second man sprang up and he changed his aim, but both were running away, bent double, unrecognizable, scuttling toward the rusted tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio rails. He fired once, but over their heads for if he had aimed and missed then the bullet could have struck home among the encamped soldiers. More men were running toward the river, shouting warnings and questions.

  Starbuck dragged himself out of the filthy water. A sentry saw him and dropped to one knee with his rifle leveled. "Who are you?" he shouted.

  "Major Starbuck. Swynyard's Brigade," Starbuck holstered the revolver and brushed stinking water off his pants. "Put the gun down, lad."

  An officer arrived demanding to know who had fired and why. Starbuck gestured at the river. "Thought I saw a man swimming. I reckoned it was an escaping Yankee."

  The officer stared at the moon-glossed river that foamed over the rocks. "I can't see anyone."

  "So I was dreaming," Starbuck said. "Now I'm going to bed."

  He walked away. He heard the word "drunk" being used, but he did not care. He knew what he had seen, but he had not known whom he had seen. Two men, his men, he guessed, and somewhere in the battalion they were still loose and waiting for their chance.

  Them and a hundred thousand Yankees. Across the river. Marching toward a town no one had ever heard of. Called Sharpsburg.

  PART TWO

  THE CREEK WELLED from a mossy spring in a low pass of the South Mountains, then flowed west and south through a rocky landscape of thin soil and old trees. Little disturbed the stream's flow in its first few miles, for there were no settlements in that part of Pennsylvania, but just east of Waynesborough the creek flowed into farmland and became muddied with the feet of cattle. There were still no bridges, for the stream was shallow enough to be forded even during the winter spate, and so it flowed on across the border into Maryland where, deepened and broadened by other streams, it reached its first bridge at Hagerstown. Fish lay in the bridge's shadow, and in summer children played in the waist-deep water.

  Past Hagerstown the creek ran southward, flowing deeper and stronger as more tributaries joined, but still it was little more than a stream. In places it ran shallow over rocks, foaming and swirling through the flickering shadows of the woods before it swung in great serpent loops between lush green fields. Deer drank from the creek, men fished from it, and cattle stood in its summer pools to cool themselves.

  The Beaver Creek joined the stream five miles south of Hagerstown and now the creek was almost a river. It could still be forded by horsemen, but the local folk had built handsome stone bridges to keep their feet dry. The creek flowed on, still looping, but hurrying now to its confluence with the Potomac River, where the creek was swallowed into the massive flow of water running to the eastern sea.

  Some four miles north of where the creek joined the Potomac River there was a spot where a shelving bank of shingle edged the water beneath a stand of great elms. It was a pretty place, cool in summer and a favorite spot for children who liked to run into the river down the shingle bank or else swing on a rope hung from an elm bough above the water, but on a couple of Sunday mornings every summer there was no playing at the place, for on those days a procession would walk up the Smoketown Road, skirt the East Woods, then follow a track across the Miller farmland that led to the creek's steep, wooded slope. There might be fifty people in the procession, rarely more, and they walked in a solemn silence that would only be broken when someone started a hymn. Then they would all join in, their voices strong as they wended between cornfields and woods toward the water. The men would be in their suits, all of them ill-cut from a dark, thick cloth, but the discomfort of the formal clothes was a tribute to the day. The women were shawled and bonneted while the children were held firmly by the hand so that no unseemly behavior would mar the occasion. At the head of the procession strode a preacher in a wide-brimmed black hat.

  Once at the river the preacher would wade into the creek and pray to the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob that He would bless this day, and bless these good people, then one by one those souls who had come to be baptized in the presence of their neighbors would walk into the water and the preacher would fold their hands on their breast, place another hand at their back, and then, with a joyous shout of blessing because a soul was being received into the heavenly host, he would thrust them backward into the creek so that the water flowed over their heads. He would hold them there for a second, then haul them upright as the congregation on the bank called loud praises for God's mercy to miserable sinners. Almost always the newly baptized men and women wept for happiness as they waded out of the creek to join the dark-suited congregation singing for them.

  They sang in German. Many of the local settlers had come from Germany and they worshipped in a small, whitewashed church that had no spire, no porch, no pulpit, no decoration of any kind, though in tribute to the hard winters there was a black-bellied iron stove standing between the well-made pews. From the outside the church looked more like a humble house than a shrine, though inside it was surprisingly spacious and would be filled with light on sunny days. The Germans were Baptists, though their English-speaking neighbors good-naturedly described them as Dunkers, because of their custom of baptism by full immersion. On the Sabbath the Germans might worship in one place and the English-speakers in another, but during the week the Poffenbergers and Millers, Kennedys and Hoffmans, Middlekaufs and Pipers were good enough neighbors and hard-working farmers, and all agreed that they shared good land. Limestone might break the rich fields here and there, but a blessed living could be made from these farms so long as a family worked diligently, trusted in God, and had patience. That was why they had come to America, to thrive and live in peace beside a Maryland creek that flowed from a low pass in the South Mountains down to the wide Potomac River.

  The creek was called the Antietam and the Dunker church lay just north of a village called Sharpsburg, and hardly a soul in America outside of Washington County, Maryland, had ever heard of either. But then the armies came.

  The rebels came first. Dirty, tired, ragged men with bleeding feet, boils on their skin, and lice in their beards. They marched south down the Hagerstown Pike raising a cloud of dust behind their gunwheels and shabby boots. Some had no boots at all, but walked barefoot. More rebels limped in from the east, crossing the creek on the handsome stone bridges. These rebels from the east wore bandages and had red-rimmed eyes and faces stained with black powder. They had fought to delay the Yankees at the passes in the hills and they had lost, and now they came to join Robert Lee's army at Sharpsburg.

  It was a tiny army. Seventeen thousand men spread into the pastures and woodlots north of the village and the farmers could only watch as their precious rail fences were dismantled to make firewood or shelters. The army's guns, with their blackened muzzles and dirt-st
ained wheels, were lined on the high ground above the creek. The guns faced east.

  The Yankees came next; sixty thousand blue-coated troops who crossed the Red Hill on the creek's eastern bank and then stopped. Just stopped.

  The rebel guns had opened fire, bouncing their solid shot off the farmland and up over the first Northern troops to show on the river's far bank. General McClellan, told that the enemy had formed a fighting line on the creek's far bank, ordered the halt. He knew that thought must be taken, plans made, and fears understood, and so the Northern troops scattered into encampments and the rebel guns, seeing that their enemy was making no attempt to cross the creek, ceased their firing.

  The gunsmoke drifted over the creek's valley and was touched pink by the setting sun. General Robert Lee watched the stalled enemy across the river, then turned to walk back toward the Hagerstown Pike where an ambulance waited to carry him to the army's headquarters just west of Sharpsburg. The General's hands were still bandaged and that made riding difficult, and so he walked while one of his aides led Traveller by the reins. Lee seemed curiously diminished out of the saddle. On horseback he looked like a tall man, but on foot he was revealed as only of average height. The ambulance was waiting beside the whitewashed Dunker church, which looked bright against the dark woods behind. The church's pews were being chopped for firewood by a battalion of Georgians who were billeted about the small house of worship.

  The General had hardly spoken as he walked back from the gunline, but now he saw Major Delaney sitting slumped beside the pike that ran in front of the church. Lee smiled. "So you're alive, Major?"

  "Happily, sir." Delaney struggled to his feet.

  "And you have seen what you came to see, yes?"

  "Fighting," Delaney said grimly.

  "Rather more than I hoped you'd see," Lee said ruefully. "It seems McClellan has greater energy than I credited him with." Lee gestured to the ambulance. "Hardly a conquering general's carriage, Major, but you're welcome to share it back to headquarters. I assume you'll pitch camp with us again?"

  "If I may, General."

  "Unless you'd rather go home?" Lee suggested charitably. He might need every man he could muster to fight McClellan, but he could hardly imagine this pale, tired lawyer being of any great help.

  "Are we to fight?" Delaney asked, climbing into the ambulance and leaving George to lead his two horses behind the slow-moving vehicle.

  "Oh, I think so," Lee answered mildly. "I rather think we must." He leaned back against the ambulance's side and looked momentarily weary, then he frowned at his bandaged hands as though frustrated by the limitations they forced on him. "At least," he said ruefully, "it stops me biting my nails." The ambulance swayed and rocked on the dry road. It was a Yankee vehicle, captured at Manassas, and highly sprung to relieve the pain of its wounded occupants, but even the best springs could not smooth out the nits of the Hagerstown Pike as it dropped into Sharpsburg. "You know what Frederick the Great once said?" Lee asked suddenly, his thoughts reverting to the trial that lay ahead. "That the unforgivable crime in war is not making the wrong decision, but making no decision. And I think we have to fight here."

  "Why?" Delaney asked, then hastily added, "I'm curious, sir," in case the General thought he was challenging his decision.

  Lee shrugged. "We invaded the North, Delaney. Are we to slink away with nothing accomplished?"

  "We captured Harper's Ferry, sir," Delaney pointed out.

  "So we did, so we did, but we set out to do a great deal more. We came north, Delaney, to inflict hurt on the enemy and that we still have to do. I had planned to inflict that pain well north of here, but I confess General McClellan has surprised me, so now I must hurt him here rather than on the Susquehanna. But here or there, what matters is to hurt him so badly that the North cannot invade us again, and Europe will see that we can defend ourselves and are thus worthy of their support. Hurt them once, Delaney, and there's a chance we'll not have to inflict pain again, but if we just slip away then McClellan will follow and we shall have to fight him on our own soil. And poor Virginia has suffered enough, God knows." The General spoke softly, rehearsing his arguments out loud, and always conscious that Belvedere Delaney carried weight in Richmond's political circles. If things went badly in the next few hours then it would be as well to have a man like Delaney retailing the General's motives to the Confederacy's leaders.

  "McClellan outnumbers us," Delaney said, unable to hide his nervousness.

  "He does indeed, but he always has," Lee answered dryly, "though this time, I confess, his preponderance is significant. We guess he has eighty thousand men. We have less than twenty." He paused, smiling at the outrageous imbalance. "But Jackson's men are marching toward us. We might line up thirty thousand against him."

  "Thirty?" Delaney was appalled at the odds.

  Lee chuckled. "Poor Delaney. You really would be happier in Richmond, I think? It would do you no dishonor to leave us. Your work here is surely doner'

  Better than you know, Delaney thought, but answered instead with a quotation from Shakespeare. " 'The fewer men, the greater share of honor.'"

  Lee smiled, recognizing Shakespeare's line from Henry V. "A few men beat a great army in that battle," he said, "and I do know one thing about these men," he gestured with a bandaged hand at his ragged troops in their bivouacs. "They are the best fighting men, Delaney, that this poor world has ever seen. They make me feel humble. Wars might be won by strategy, but battles are won by morale, and if you and I, my friend, should live to be a hundred we shall never see troops as good as these. McClellan is nervous of them, very nervous, and tomorrow he has to attack them and he will do it gingerly. And if he is as cautious as I expect, then we shall have a chance to tear his army into pieces."

  Delaney shuddered at the thought of battle. "He hasn't been cautious these last few days, sir," he said warningly.

  Lee nodded. "He got wind of our dispositions. We don't know how, but some sympathizers at Frederick sent us a message telling us that McClellan was boasting that he had us in the bag. Well, so he did, but it's one thing to have a bag and it's quite another to stuff the wildcat inside the bag. Believe me, Delaney, his caution will return. It already has returned! If I was across that river I wouldn't be bivouacking now. I'd be pushing brigades over the valley, I'd be thrusting hard, I'd be fighting, but McClellan is waiting, and every hour that he waits brings Jackson's men closer to us."

  But even when Jackson's men came, Delaney thought, Lee's army would be less than half the size of McClellan's. The rebellion was surely doomed and Delaney, rejoicing in that thought and in the part he had played in the destruction, still felt a regret for Lee. The General was a good man, a very good and honorable man, but Lee had no ambassadorships in his pocket and so Delaney prayed that on the morrow he would watch the Confederacy die in the ripe fields beside the Antietam.

  Tuesday, September 17, dawned hot and sultry. The Confederate pickets, warned of an enemy attack, stared across the river through a heavy fog that slowly lightened as the sun rose above the Red Hill. The pickets feared the blast of cannons loaded with canister and the splashing of men carrying bayonets and loaded rifles through the river's fords, but no such attack came. McClellan, if he did but know it, had succeeded in the dearest wish of all fighting generals: He had trapped his enemy's army while it was split into two parts, and if McClellan had lunged across the stream he could have destroyed Lee's small army, then marched against Jackson's scattered men as they hurried north from Harper's Ferry.

  But McClellan did not move. He waited.

  The sun burned the last of the fog from the creek and nervous rebel pickets stared across the water at green leaves from which the smoke of campfires drifted gently. Confederate cavalry reconnoitered the Antietam's banks north and south of Lee's position, but no Northern troops were attempting the crossing, nor, astonishingly, were any Northern cavalry making similar patrols in the drowsy, heavy countryside. There were Yankee troops marching, but those
men formed the tail of McClellan's huge army as it crossed the hills toward the Antietam's eastern bank. The sixty thousand Yankees became seventy-five thousand and still McClellan did not advance. He waited.

  He waited just two and a half miles east of the Dunker church, on the Yankee bank of the Antietam, in the Pry family farmhouse. The farm had a substantial house, ample barns, and well-drained fields that sloped from the Red Hill down to the creek's banks. Most of the fields were stubble now, though some were tall with corn that was almost ready to be harvested. One meadow was stacked with hay, a second had a fine crop of clover, while the higher fields had just been plowed for the planting of winter wheat. Yankees were bivouacked in all the meadows and had torn down the haystacks to make their mattresses. Some played baseball, some wrote home, others lay reading in whatever shade they could discover on this hot, humid day. Once in a while a man would peer through the trees at the distant line of rebel guns crowning the western skyline, but until they received orders to attack they were content to rest. Little Mac would see them right. The newspapers might call McClellan the Young Napoleon, but to the Northern soldiers he was always Little Mac and the one thing they knew and loved in Little Mac was that he would never risk their lives unnecessarily. They trusted him, and so they were content to wait.