The Bloody Ground

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Stand up!" a voice shouted from among the Georgian survivors.

  "Stand!" Starbuck took up the cry and heard Swynyard echo it.

  "Fire!" Starbuck shouted, and on either side of him the ragged remnants of the rebel line stood like scarecrows from among the bloodied dead and poured a volley into the compact Yankee formation. The attacker's front file collapsed, then a roundshot ripped through the remaining ranks like a ball thumping into skittles.

  Starbuck rammed a bullet home, propped the ramrod against his body, fired, and loaded again. The Yankees were spreading out, running crablike across the cornfield to match the rebel line with a line of their own. More blue uniforms were streaming up behind. God, he thought, but was there no end to the bastards? The rebel line coalesced into groups as men instinctively sought the company of others, but then, when the Yankee fire became torrid, they lay down again to fight from behind the corpses. Men lying down fired more slowly than men standing, and the slackening of rebel fire persuaded the Northern officers to shout their men forward, but the advance was checked when the rebel guns opened fire with case shot—metal balls that exploded in the air to rain down a shower of musket balls—and that deadly shower persuaded the Yankees to lie down. Truslow's company was firing at the Yankees' open flank, evidence that no Northerners had attacked down the East Woods, but then Starbuck saw Bob Decker running zigzag in the pasture, crouching low and evidently looking for someone. "Bob!" Starbuck shouted to attract his attention.

  Decker ran to Starbuck and dropped beside him. "I'm looking for Swynyard, sir."

  "God knows." Starbuck raised himself to peer over the corpse that sheltered him and saw a Yankee flag carrier kneeling in the com. He fired and dropped back.

  "Truslow says there are Yankees beyond the wood, sir." Decker pointed east.

  Starbuck swore. Till now that open flank had been blessedly free of Yankees, but if an attack did come from the open country to the east then there was no way that the survivors in the pasture could cope with it. The Yankees would sweep into the East Woods, then out into the pasture, and the Yankees pinned down in the cornfield would join the attack. "You find Swynyard," he ordered Decker, "and tell him I've gone to take a look."

  He ran eastward. Bullets whipped past him, but the lingering smoke spoiled the Yankees' aim. Starbuck saw Potter and shouted at him to bring his company, then he was in the trees. He jumped a newly fallen branch, twisted past two rebel corpses, then ran on until he reached the Smoketown Road. He paused there, wondering if the Yankees still held the trees beyond, but he could see no movement and so he crossed the dirt track and ran on through the trees. A wounded Yankee called out for water, but Starbuck ignored the man. He headed toward the wood's edge through trunks gouged and splintered and drilled by bullets.

  He dropped in the shadows at the tree line. To the east, where the land dropped away to the creek, he could see nothing, but to the north, where the Smoketown Road emerged from the trees to vanish beneath a crest neatly plowed into furrows, were Yankees. Another damned horde of Yankees. They were two wide fields away and for the moment they were not moving. Starbuck could see officers riding up and down the ranks, he could see the banners hanging in the still air, and he knew that the Yankees were being readied to attack. And all that stood between them and Lee's center were two shrunken companies of skirmishers.

  "The good Lord is surely testing us today," Swynyard said, catching sight of Starbuck. The Colonel knelt beside him and stared at the waiting Yankees. Potter was behind him with a dozen men; all that remained of his company.

  Starbuck felt a vast relief that Swynyard had arrived. "What do we do, sir?"

  "Pray?" Swynyard shrugged. "If we bring our men here then we open up the cornfield, if we leave them there, we open up this door."

  "So we pray," Starbuck said grimly.

  "And send for help." Swynyard backed away. "Leave someone here to watch them, Nate, and let me know when they advance." He ran off through the woods.

  Starbuck left Sergeant Rothwell to watch the Yankees, while he led Potter and his men back across the Smoketown Road to the inner edge of the East Woods, where Truslow was harassing the Yankee flank in the cornfield. "What are those sons of bitches doing?" Truslow asked, meaning the Yankees formed on the Smoketown Road.

  "Dressing ranks. Getting a speech."

  "Let's hope it's a long one." Truslow had torn away the pants leg from his wounded thigh and bound the injury with a bandage torn from a dead man's shirt. He spat tobacco juice, lifted his rifle, and fired. He was aiming at the cannon that still stood on the knoll in the cornfield, keeping its gunners in shelter so they could not rake the rebel line with canister. He reloaded, took aim, then turned to his right before pulling the trigger. There were shouts among the trees and Truslow was suddenly shouting at his men to fall back. The Yankees were coming through the woods again.

  Starbuck saw a banner among the shredded leaves. He fired at the color bearer, then fell back with Truslow's company. "Rothwell!" he shouted through the trees, knowing he would not be heard, but knowing he had to warn the Sergeant. "Rothwell!" He did not want the Sergeant marooned in the trees and he wondered if he should run to fetch the man.

  But then all hell broke loose on the cornfield's far side.

  * * *

  General McClellan dabbed at his lips with a napkin, then brushed crumbs of toast from his lap. He was aware of the gaze of the civilian spectators and he kept a stern look on his face so that none of those onlookers would be aware of the worries that racked him.

  He was risking a trap. He knew it instinctively, even if he did not know just what form the trap would take. Lee outnumbered him, he was sure, and Lee was fighting a defensive battle and that could only mean that the enemy was disguising his intentions. Somewhere in the landscape a mass of rebels was waiting to attack, and McClellan was determined not to be caught by that surprise assault. He would hold men in reserve to counter it. He would frustrate Lee. He would preserve the army.

  "Sir?" An aide stooped beside McClellan's chair. "Dan'l Webster, sir, he's unhappy."

  "Unhappy?" McClellan asked. Daniel Webster was his horse.

  "The civilians, sir, they're plucking his tail hairs. As souvenirs, sir. We could ask them to move, sir? Up the hill, maybe?"

  "There must be a stable?"

  "He's in the stable, sir."

  "Then shut it!" McClellan did not want to lose his audience. He rather enjoyed their admiration. Indeed, stretching his legs once in a while, he liked to chat with them and assure them that all was well. There was no need to worry mere civilians with his concerns, or tell them that he had telegraphed Washington with an urgent request that every Northern soldier available should be hurried west toward the army. Those soldiers could not of course reach the battlefield in time to join the fight, but they might provide a rear guard behind which his army could retire if Lee's masterstroke brought chaos. The hotheads in his army, fools like Colonel Thorne, might wonder why he did not unleash the men poised to cross the river and attack the rebels' flank, but those fools did not understand the army's danger.

  More men marched down to the creek where the columns waited for the order to cross. One unit sang "John Brown's Body" as they marched close to the Pry farm and McClellan scowled. He hated that song and had tried to forbid it being sung. So far as McClellan was concerned there had been nothing to admire in John Brown's foolish adventure. The man had tried to start a slave rebellion, for God's sake, and his hanging, McClellan believed, had been richly rewarded. He tried to ignore the music as he stooped to his telescope to watch the troops on the creek's far side, who were forming up for a new attack on the smoke-wreathed woods. "That's Mansfield's corps?" he asked an aide.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Tell them to go!"

  He would let Mansfield attack and see what happened. At best they would push Lee's men back and at worst they would provoke the dreaded riposte. McClellan almost prayed for that riposte to happen, for then, at least, the fea
rs would take solid shape and he would know just what he had to deal with. But for now he would go on attacking in the north and stay alert for the horror he knew must come.

  Three miles away, in a grove of trees near Sharpsburg, Robert Lee stared at a map. He was not studying the map, indeed he was hardly aware that he was looking at it. Belvedere Delaney was among the aides who hovered nearby. The General liked Delaney and had invited him to keep him company. It was good to have someone slightly irreverent, someone who offered amusement rather than advice.

  A crescendo of firing sounded from the higher ground north of the town. In a moment, Lee knew, the gunsmoke would billow above the skyline to mark where the fighting had erupted so suddenly. "That's it," he said mildly.

  "It?" Delaney asked.

  Lee smiled. "Hood's men, Delaney, almost our last reserves. Not, to be honest, that they were reserves." Lee had ruthlessly stripped troops from the southern part of his battle line to preserve the army's northern perimeter so that now, beyond a fragile skin of troops that edged the creek, he had nothing to fight an outflanking attack from the south.

  "So what do we do?" Delaney asked.

  "Put our trust in McClellan, of course," Lee said with a smile, "and pray that Ambrose Hill reaches us in time."

  The Light Division was marching as it had never marched before. It was still south of the Potomac and a long way from the ford at Shepherdstown, but the ever-present sound of the big guns was the summons that kept them moving. Staff officers rode up and down the long column urging the men on. Marching troops were usually given ten minutes' rest an hour, but not today. Today there could be no rest, just marching. The dust kicked up from the dry road choked men's throats, some limped on bare bleeding feet, but no one straggled. If a man dropped out he dropped like the dead, dropped out of sheer exhaustion, but most kept grimly going. They had no breath to sing, not even to speak, just to march and march and march. To where the guns were sounding and the piles of dead grew high.

  GENERAL JOHN HOOD'S division burst out of the West Woods to hit the flank of the attacking Yankees like a tidal wave. Most of Hood's men were Texans, but he had battalions from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina in his ranks, and all were veterans. They stopped the Yankee advance dead on the turnpike, then spread their battle line across the pasture, where they faced north toward the cornfield. One volley was enough to decimate the Yankees advancing through the corn, then the Texans were screaming the rebel yell and plunging forward with bayonets. Some small groups of Yankees resisted and were cut down, but most just fled. The North's attack was spent, the rebel counter-attack was surging, and the survivors of the old defense line, the battered, bleeding men from Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia, went forward with Hood's men.

  The Yankee artillery by the North Woods took up the battle. They could not use canister, for the ground in front of them was littered with wounded Northerners, and so they cut their shell fuses as short as they dared and opened fire. The shells crashed into the cornfield, flinging men aside and adding a new skein of smoke to the cirrus-like canopy that hung above the trampled crop. The noise reached a new and dreadful intensity. The Northern gunners worked frantically, double-shotting some guns to belch out pairs of shells that exploded a heartbeat after

  firing. The guns by the turnpike were unhampered by wounded men and they turned their canister on the Texans advancing on the road. One barrel load of bullets ripped up forty feet of snake fence and drove its splintered remnants into a company of rebels. Yankee infantry appeared from the North Woods to add their volley fire, and ail the while the rebel cannon lobbed their long-fused shells over the flags of Hood's Division to harry the Northern gunners.

  The Yankee gunners at the northern edge of the cornfield died hard. They tried to keep the fight going, but they were in easy range of the Texan skirmishers and one by one the guns were abandoned. Still the Confederates drove forward, skirting the piles of dead and dying in the cornfield, struggling through the rage of bullet and shell as though they could sweep the Yankees clear up to Hag-erstown and beyond. Some officers tried to check their men, knowing they were advancing too far, but no voice could be heard in the tempest of iron and lead. The battle had become a gutter fight, rage against rage, men dying in a cornfield that had become death's kingdom.

  A regiment from Mississippi pursued the broken Yankees toward the northern edge of the broken corn, sure they were chasing shattered troops to utter defeat, but the Yankees had Pennsylvanian infantry waiting at the rail fence. The blue-coated riflemen were lying down, resting their barrels on the fence's lowest rail. A standing man could see nothing but smoke, but at ground level the waiting infantry could see the legs of the attackers.

  They waited. Waited till the rebels were just thirty paces off, then loosed a volley that ripped into Hood's men and silenced the screaming rebel yells in one curt blow. For an instant, an odd, mind-numbing instant, there was a silence on the battlefield as though the wings of death's angel were sweeping overhead, but then the silence passed as the Pennsylvanians stood up to reload and their ramrods clattered in hot barrels and the Northern guns jarred back on their trails to add more carnage to the slaughter in the corn. The front rank of the Confederates was a horror of writhing bodies, blood, and moans. A man snatched up the fallen banner of Mississippi and was shot down. A second man gripped the flag by its fringe and dragged it back through the corn as the Pennsylvanians fired a second volley that thumped into flesh with brutal force. The flag fell again, riddled with bullets. A third man seized the banner and raised it high, then walked backward from the blazing rifle fire until he was driven down with bullets in his belly, groin, and chest. A fourth man speared the flag on his bayonet and pulled it back to where the survivors of his battalion were forming a crude line to return the Pennsylvanian fire. The space between the two lines seemed to be a shifting mass of dirt, a heaving, crawling pile of giant maggots that blindly struggled to find safety. It was the wounded pushing the dead away and trying to rejoin their comrades.

  The right flank of Hood's attack swept into the East Woods. There, protected by the battered trees from the effects of the Northern guns, the Texans drove into the Yankees, who were advancing southward. Men fought within spitting distance. For a time the two sides traded shots, neither willing to retreat and neither able to advance, but slowly the rebel fire gained the advantage as more men came from the pasture. The Yankees retreated and the retreat became hurried as the rebels pushed forward with bayonets.

  Starbuck and his men were weary, bruised, wounded, and parched, but they fought among the trees with the desperation of soldiers who believed that one last effort would rid them of their enemies. Again and again the Yankees had come forward, and again and again they had been pushed back, and this time it seemed as if they could be pushed clear back out of the woods altogether. One group of Northerners turned a pile of cordwood into a miniature redoubt. Their rifle barrels spat long flames over the logpile, the tongues of fire oddly bright in the shadow of the trees. Starbuck used his revolver, firing at murderously close range into the Yankees, who suddenly abandoned the logs as a rush of screaming Texans swept up from their right. A small black dog stayed with its dead master, running back and forth and barking piteously as the rebels ran past. Starbuck unslung his rifle, paused to reload it, then ran on toward the fighting. He came to the road that ran through the woods and crouched" at its edge, watching as Yankees dashed across to escape the charge. He fired, saw a man sprawl in the grass that grew down the road's center, then he sprinted over the dirt road himself. The fight seemed to be dying as the Yankees legged it out of the trees and so he squatted by a limestone knoll and began the laborious business of reloading the revolver.

  Lucifer ran over the road, leading the black dog on a makeshift leash of two rifle slings. "You shouldn't be here," Starbuck said, making space for the boy behind the knoll.

  "I always wanted a dog," Lucifer said proudly. "Got to find him a name."

  "There a
re still Yankees in the wood," Starbuck said, pushing down the lever that rammed the revolver's chambers.

  "I shot one," Lucifer said.

  "You damn fool," Starbuck said fondly. "They're fighting for your freedom." He levered down the last chamber, then upturned the gun to push on the percussion caps.

  "I'd have shot more," Lucifer said, "only the gun don't work." He offered Starbuck his revolver. The trigger hung limp.

  "It needs a new stop spring," Starbuck said, handing the gun back, "but you shouldn't be fighting. Hell, these bastards are trying to liberate you and you're killing the poor sons of bitches." Lucifer did not answer. Instead he frowned at his gun and twitched the trigger in hope that it would engage on some part of the mechanism. The small dog whimpered and he soothed it. It was a puppy, scarce weaned, with coarse black hair, a snub nose, and a stump of a tail. "The bastards will kill you," Starbuck warned him. "You and your dog."

  "So I die," Lucifer said defiantly. "And in heaven we get to be the masters and you all are our slaves."

  Starbuck grinned. "I don't reckon on seeing heaven."

  "But maybe your hell is our heaven," Lucifer said with relish. "Imp," he added.

  "Imp?" Starbuck asked, "imp of Satan?"

  "The dog! I'm going to call him Imp," Lucifer said delightedly as he ruffled Imp's ears. "Got to get you some meat, Imp." The stumpy tail suddenly wagged as the dog licked Lucifer's face. "I always wanted a dog," Lucifer said again.