The Bloody Ground

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Accurate, too," Starbuck said, looking at his own dead skirmishers. Sergeant Rothwell was alive, and so was Potter, but too many good men had died. Case was alive, leading a small coterie of his cronies. Case, like a couple of his friends, had pinned a dead Pennsylvanian's buck's tail to his own hat to show he had killed one of the feared skirmishers and Starbuck liked the gesture. "Case!" he shouted.

  Case turned his gaze on Starbuck, saying nothing. "You're a sergeant."

  A flicker of a smile showed on the grim face, then Case turned away. "He don't like you," Truslow said. "He's the one I fought."

  "The one you should have killed," Truslow said. "He's a good soldier."

  "Good soldiers make bad enemies," Truslow observed, then spat tobacco juice.

  The brigade formed again where it had started the day, though now its ranks had been thinned by death. Men from Haxall's Arkansas regiment helped the wounded back to the graveyard, while others brought water from the springhouse of the burned farm. Starbuck sent a dozen men to loot the cartridge pouches of the dead and distribute the ammunition. Lucifer brought Starbuck a full canteen of water. "Mister Tumlin," Lucifer said gleefully, "is in the graveyard."

  "Dead?" Starbuck asked savagely.

  "Hiding behind the wall."

  "Dennison?"

  "Him too," Lucifer grinned.

  "Sons of bitches," Starbuck said. He turned to run over to the graveyard, but just then a bugle sounded and the Yankee artillery began to fire again and Starbuck turned back.

  The second Northern attack was coming.

  In Harper's Ferry the noise of battle was like distant thunder, but a thunder that never ended. Vagaries of wind would sometimes dull the sound to a grumble, or else magnify it so that the ominous crack of individual guns could be heard.

  The captured Federal garrison had been marched away to captivity and now the last rebel soldiers prepared to leave the small, ransacked town. The troops were General Hill's Light Division, three thousand of Jackson's best men, and they had seventeen miles to march to reach the source of the bruising noise that filled the sky.

  It promised to be a hot day, a searing hot day, a day when marching would be hell, but nothing to the hell that waited for them at their journey's end. General Hill wore his red shirt, a sign he expected to fight.

  The Light Division began its march, while ten miles north, but blocked from them by the wide Potomac River, their comrades pushed new powder into blackened rifle barrels and a new mass of Yankees, more numerous than the first, came down the turnpike.

  And the battle was scarcely a half hour old.

  BILLY BLYTHE RECKONED he had miscalculated. He had only ever seen one battle and that had been fought close to the Bull Run, where the hills were smaller and steeper than this high plateau between the Antietam and the Potomac, and at Manassas there had been far more woods, which had provided easy places for a man to hide while the battle's tide washed extravagantly past. He had planned on doing just that this day—slipping away in the confusion and finding some deep place in the green trees where no one would find him until the killing was over.

  Instead he discovered himself on a high, bare place cut by fences and lanes, and where the only woods were either firmly in rebel hands or else were the scenes of savage fighting. And that meant there was nowhere to hide and nowhere to run, and so Billy Blythe sheltered behind the graveyard's low stone wall and wondered just how he was ever going to abandon the rebel army and join the Northern troops. He made what preparation he could. For a time he had busied himself among the wounded, though it was no act of mercy that had motivated him, but rather the need to discover a well-bloodied gray coat that he could exchange for his tight jacket. Then, wearing the blood-damp coat so that he looked like one of the wounded himself, he settled down to wait.

  "You hurt?" Dennison saw Tumlin lying against the wall.

  "Nothing that'll kill me, Tom," Blythe answered.

  Dennison reloaded the rifle he had borrowed from one of the wounded. Every few moments he would peer over the stone wall's coping and fire a shot at the Yankee skirmishers who edged the East Woods. He had fled from those woods earlier, driven out by the terrifying fire of the Pennsylvanian rifles and now, with half of his company, he sheltered behind the graveyard wall. The other half of his company was lost. Dennison knew he should not be here, that he should have stayed with Starbuck's battalion, but he had been drowned by terror in the opening minutes because he had never imagined that battle could be so overwhelmingly violent. At Gaines's Mill, where the Yellowlegs had earned their derisory nickname, Dennison had never come close to the real battle, but somehow he had imagined that combat would prove to be a more decorous business, something like the prints of the Revolutionary War that hung on his uncle's walls. In those prints the two opposing lines always stood upright with noble expressions of grim resolve, the dead had the good manners to lie face down so that their wounds were hidden, while the wounded were relegated to the edges of the pictures where they expired palely and gracefully in the arms of their comrades. That had been Dennison's expectation, but in the first few shattering moments of this bloody day beside the Antietam he had discovered that the reality of battle was a gut-loosening slaughter in which a man's wits were banished by noise and where the wounded died with their bellies slit open, their brains splattered on turf, and their voices screaming helplessly as they thrashed in agony. And all the while the noise banged on and on, and the bullets hissed and whistled, and the terrible shells crashed incessantly.

  A doctor, his hands, sleeves, and shirtfront drenched in blood, saw Billy Blythe's coat and stepped over the recumbent bodies toward him. "You need help, soldier?"

  "I'll be back on my feet right soon, doctor," Blythe answered. "Bleeding's stopped and I'll be back in the line when I've got my breath. You look after the others, sir."

  "You're a brave man," the doctor said, and moved on to find another casualty.

  Blythe grinned, then lit a cigar. "Reckon you're doing the right thing, Tom," he said to Dennison.

  "I am?" Dennison had knelt ready to fire another shot, but just then a bullet struck the wall's top and ricocheted on into one of the trees that shaded the graves, and Dennison slumped back down beside Blythe.

  "Keeping your men in reserve," Blythe said. "That shows you've got your wits about you. I admire that."

  Dennison shuddered as a shell exploded nearby to rattle the stone wall's far side with scraps of metal. "We can't stay here all day," he said, some small part of him recognizing that there was a duty to fulfill on the field.

  Blythe twisted round and raised his head above the wall. "You could take your men back to the woods now," he said. A few moments before those woods had been edged with Yankees firing at the graveyard, but those marksmen seemed to have disappeared and, for the moment at least, the nearer edge of the trees seemed deserted, but another Yankee attack was coming, which suggested that the southern edge of the trees would once again become a battleground. Which meant that Blythe would wait. If the rebels regained a firm hold of the trees then he might go back and find a place to hide, but till then he would let the stone wall shelter him.

  Dennison snatched a look at the shattered branches and riven trunks of the East Woods, which looked as though a giant axman had gone berserk among its trees, then ducked back. "Maybe I'll keep my men in reserve," he said.

  "Good decision, Tom," Blythe said. "But I doubt Starbuck would agree. Starbuck just wants your men dead. Hell, he don't care." Dennison looked scared at the mention of Starbuck and Blythe shook his head. "Reckon you'll have to deal with Mister Starbuck if the Yankees don't oblige you. And that means dealing with his lackeys too. Like Sergeant Rothwell. Perhaps Bobby Case can help you?"

  "I ain't seen Case," Dennison said. "Maybe he's dead."

  "You'd better pray not. You're going to need friends, Tom, otherwise Starbuck will have you on a court-martial. I know you're doing the right thing, and you know it too, but will Starbuck know? You'd better ma
ke sure, Tom. I'd hate to see a good man like you sacrificed by a Yankee bastard like Starbuck. I reckon you'd best find Bobby Case and talk to him. Do your duty by the battalion and your country."

  Dennison looked shocked at the thought of being court-martialed for cowardice. "Deal with Starbuck?" he asked faintly.

  "Unless you want a few bad years in prison. Of course, they could just shoot you, but most court-martials end in prison, don't they? You and some niggers chained together picking cotton or breaking up rocks?" Blythe was making it up as he went along, but he could see his words were getting through to Dennison's dulled senses. "My name ain't Billy Tumlin," Blythe went on, "if you don't have an urgent need to take care of Starbuck. Starbuck and Rothwell."

  "Starbuck and Rothwell?" Dennison asked.

  "And Potter, too," Blythe said. "And that damned nigger boy. Get your enemies out of the way, Tom, then you can soar! You can be a great soldier. My, I envy you.

  I won't be here to see it on account of being back home in Louisiana, but I'll watch your career. Upon my soul, I will."

  "You reckon Case will help me?" Dennison asked nervously. He was afraid of Case. There was something very dangerous in Case's big, brooding presence and unreadable eyes. "You sure he'll help?"

  "I know he will," Blythe said firmly. It had been Case who had helped Blythe during the night in Harper's Ferry, but that attack on Starbuck had been both opportunistic and clumsy. Things would be much easier now, for what was one pair of deaths among so much carnage? "I told Bobby you'd make him into an officer," Blythe said. "I reckon Bobby Case deserves to be an officer, don't you?"

  "I reckon," Dennison agreed vigorously.

  "So find him, Tom, and do your duty. Hell, you don't want to see Starbuck throw a whole battalion away, do you?"

  Dennison settled back to think about matters while Blythe leaned contentedly against the wall and drew on his cigar. It was as easy, Blythe reckoned, as stealing from a country church poor-box. He would have his inconvenient enemies killed, then he would somehow cross the lines to his reward in the North. He touched his Federal commission, which was still hidden in his pants pocket, then waited.

  To Starbuck it was like a nightmare from which he had awoken, only to find the nightmare was real. The rebel line had hurled one attack back, but now another identical assault tramped stolidly down the funnel between the East and West Woods. It was like Ezekiel's valley of dead bones on which the sinews were stretched, the flesh placed, and the skin wrapped before the breath of God animated the dry bones into a great army. And now, in this waking nightmare, that army advanced on Starbuck and he wondered, in the name of God, just how many more warriors the Yankees could produce.

  The new attack again filled the space between the West and East Woods. It came beneath flags, accompanied by drums, trampling over the blood and horror of what was left of the first attack. Yankee skirmishers ran forward, dropped to their knees in the remnants of the corn, and opened fire.

  The rebel guns, charged with canister, roared at the advancing line. Starbuck saw one skirmisher lifted from the ground by the strike of the canister and flung backward like a rag doll hurled by a petulant child. The man sprawled back to earth, then, amazingly, picked himself up, found his rifle, and limped away. A rebel skirmisher shot him in the back and the man pitched forward onto his knees, hesitated, then fell flat.

  "Wait!" Swynyard was loping along the back of his line. His men were lying down and, at a casual glance, they looked like a solid brigade, but Swynyard knew that too many of the prone men were already dead. They had been killed in the first attack, and too many of the living would soon share their fate. Swynyard looked behind but could see no more reinforcements. "We hold them here, boys," he called aloud. "Hold them here. Wait till you see their belt buckles. Don't waste bullets. Hold hard, boys, hold hard."

  More Yankees were pushing through the East Woods. The rebels had nothing there but Truslow's heavy skirmish line, and after trading a handful of shots, that line pulled back rather than be overrun. Starbuck saw Potter emerge from the trees and ran over to join him. "What's happening?"

  "Thousands of the sons of bitches," Potter said breath-lessly. His eyes were bright, his face drawn, and his breath hoarse.

  "Brigade attack," Truslow, who had followed Potter from the trees, offered more usefully. He put his men at the end of Swynyard's line where they crouched, waiting for the storm to break.

  The rebel gunners had seen the gray skirmishers come out of the East Woods and, reckoning that there were Yankees to be killed, switched some of their fire onto the trees. Shells hammered into the timber where great elms swayed as if caught in a hurricane. Branches splintered down with the iron shards of shell fragments, leaf scraps blew like rain. More shells poured into the woods while the other rebel guns cracked their loads of canister at the Yankees in the cornfield, who were at last in range of the waiting rifles.

  "Fire!" Swynyard called.

  The rifles began their work, but every downed Yankee was replaced by more men from the rear ranks. The edge of the wood was infested by Yankees, who hid behind trees and shot at the rebels in the open pasture. The Northern skirmishers targeted the rebel gunners, trying to suppress the deadly canister, and minute by minute their bullets did their work. The Northern line came forward in small groups, knelt, opened fire, then darted forward again. The sound of the Northern volleys was like shredding calico or like a canebrake burning. There was no beginning and no end to the rifles' noise, just a continuous splintering horror that filled the air with whistling lead. The rebels began to glance behind, wondering where salvation lay in this open-air hell. The smoke stretched in another thin cloud above the cornfield.

  Starbuck crouched among the men of Cartwright's company and fought as a rifleman. There was nothing eke to do. There were no useful commands to shout, no reserves to fetch, nothing to do but fight. The fear that had haunted him for a month was still there, but at bay now, lurking like a beast in the shadows. He was too busy to be aware of it. For him, as for the others who still survived in the rebel line, the battle had become a tiny patch of earth circumscribed by smoke, blood, and burning grass. He had no conception of time, nor of what happened elsewhere. He heard the shells boom overhead and the unending thunder of the guns all around, and he knew that the foul-smelling air all about him was thick with bullets, but all his concentration was now on loading and firing. He picked his targets, watching one group of Yankees trying to work their way down the edge of the East Woods. He would choose one man, watch him, wait till the man checked to load his rifle, then fire. He saw an officer, shot at him, then dropped the rifle butt onto the ground as he pulled a cartridge from the bottom of his pouch. An enemy bullet hit the rifle's stock, almost snatching it from his grasp and driving great splinters from its butt. He swore, rammed the bullet home, brought the broken stock up to his shoulder, primed the cone, and saw the officer was still alive, still shouting his troops forward, and so he fired again. His shoulder was tender from the rifle's recoil and his fingernail was bleeding from picking the hot shattered caps from the cone. The rifle's barrel was almost too hot to touch. The man next to him was dead, shot through one eye, and Starbuck rifled the man's pouch to find six cartridges.

  Truslow was hit in the thigh. He cursed, clapped a hand on the bleeding wound, then scrabbled in his pouch for a tin of moss and spider's web that he had kept for this moment. He ripped his pants leg apart, gritted his teeth, then stuffed the mixture into the entry and exit wounds. He rammed the moss and web in, suffering the pain, then picked up his rifle and looked for the son of a bitch who had shot at him. Robert Decker was crawling among the dead, rescuing cartridges, which he tossed to the living. Potter was firing and loading, firing and loading, always keeping his front toward the enemy so that no bullet struck the precious bottle of whiskey in his pack.

  The Yankee line seemed to thicken rather than thin. More blue-coated troops were coming down the funnel to stiffen the attack, and now a Northern gun team
galloped right into the cornfield and slewed about in a shower of dirt and broken stalks to position their cannon on a slight rise of ground that lay at the field's northern margin. A gun horse went down to a blast of rebel case-shot. It screamed and flailed at the air with its hooves. It thrashed its neck, spraying blood while a gunner cut it out from the rest of the panicking team that he ran back out of rifle range. Another gunner shot the wounded horse, then his companions fired their first shot—a shell that landed plumb in the center of the rebel line. The Yankee gunners were screaming at their own infantry to clear a field of fire so they could load with canister. "We can't last," Truslow growled to Starbuck.

  "Jesus," Starbuck said. If Truslow sensed defeat, then disaster must be close. He knew Truslow was right, but still he did not want to admit it. The Yankees had come within an ace of breaking the fragile line, and when that line was dead or captured they would charge across the plateau's top to pierce the very center of Lee's army. The rebels were still enduring the Northern fire, but Starbuck guessed that most, like him, were simply too scared to run away. A man trying to retreat across the plateau would make himself an easy target and it seemed safer to crouch low behind barriers of the dead and keep on fighting.

  The Yankee gun in the cornfield coughed a barrel of canister that churned dead and living flesh before ricocheting on into the pasture behind. A rebel gun was hand-spiked round to fire at the Yankee cannon, but a group of blue skirmishers killed the rebel gun crew. A color bearer in the Yankee lines waved a flag and Starbuck saw the arms of his home state, Massachusetts. A foolhardy Northern officer galloped a horse behind his men, encouraging them. Such men made choice targets, but the rebels were too few and too desperate to do anything now but pour a blind fire straight into the gunsmoke in hope of keeping the overwhelming Yankee mass away. More Northern canister crashed from the gun in the cornfield and more rebels died. Truslow's leg was soaked in blood. "You should see a doctor," Starbuck said. He was shaking, not with fear, but with a desperate excitement. He had one cartridge left.