The Bloody Ground

by Bernard Cornwell

  Yankee officer on horseback. The man was white-bearded, his uniform was heavy with braid, and he was shouting desperately at the milling Northerners who were recoiling from the fire from the woods. Starbuck wondered if the man was a general, then aimed at the inviting target. At least a dozen other rebels had seen the man and there was a small fusillade of shots, and when the rifles' smoke had thinned, there was only a riderless horse.

  The firing in the cornfield reached a new intensity. Swynyard tapped Starbuck's shoulder. "See what's happening, Nate. I don't want to be trapped here."

  Starbuck ran through the woods. Above him was the noise of bullets and case shot whipping through the leaves, provoking a constant shower of leaf scraps. The wood's center was empty, except for the dead and dying, but as he neared the western edge the rebels became thick again. They were firing at a single regiment of Yankees, which appeared to have made a lone charge through the broken corn. The Yankees seemed confused and abandoned, for no other battalions had supported their charge, and now, surrounded by rebels, they had huddled into a mass that was inviting a grim punishment from the rebels. One of the blue-coated men waved a New York flag to encourage his comrades, then a case shot cracked into smoke just above the flag that fell instantly. The Yankees began to retreat, and the rebels, heartened by the small victory, pushed forward into the corn again. It seemed to Starbuck that every rebel in Maryland was being thrust into the fight in one last desperate attempt to hold the position. Men were running from the West Woods to thicken the line that trampled forward into the corn. Captain Peel was there with more survivors from Starbuck's battalion and Starbuck ran to join them. The ground in the cornfield felt lumpy because of the fallen cobs and because so many blasts of canister and case shot had littered the earth. A skin of smoke hung at breast height above the corn, while everywhere there was puddled blood, broken men, flies, and shattered weapons.

  The rebel line advanced clear through the cornfield, but was again stopped at its northern edge. The Northerners had their own battle line waiting and that line gave a terrible volley that cracked into the rebel counterattack. Cannons belched canister, battalions fired volleys, but the insanity of battle had gripped the Southerners and instead of retreating from the overwhelming fire, they stayed and fired back into the Yankees. Starbuck scrabbled among the last few cartridges in his pouch and listened to the terrible swish of canister raking through the fallen corn and to the thump of bullets striking home. Some men knelt to fight and others lay down to see beneath the thickening smoke band.

  The fight seemed to last forever, though later, counting his cartridges, Starbuck knew it could only have been a couple of minutes. He was unaware of making any sound, but he was keening a high moaning noise that was the product of pure terror. On either side of him men fell, and at every second he expected to suffer the banging impact of a bullet, but he stayed where he was, loading and firing, and he tried to blot out the noise of the screams and the bullets and the guns by singing the high unchanging note. He was working slowly, his brain fuddled by the chaos, so that he had to think about each action. The spent powder had caked in the grooves of his rifle's barrel, making it hard to force each bullet down. He had propped his ramrod against his belly to make it easier to retrieve after each shot, but it kept falling into the corn and every time he stooped to pick it up he wanted to lay down and stay down. He wanted to be anywhere in all the world except here in death's kingdom. He loaded again and saw one of his men fold slowly over, gasping for breath. Another man dragged himself back through the corn, leaving a trail of blood from a shattered leg. A Yankee drum lay discarded in the corn, its skin punctured by bullets. Little flames flickered in the corn where bullet wadding had started fires. A Georgian officer was on his knees, hands clasped at his groin as he heaved in small breaths and stared in desperate misery at the blood spilling down his thighs. The man looked up and caught Starbuck's eye. "Shoot me," he said, "for pity's sake, man, shoot me."

  Then, from the northern part of the East Woods, a new volley crashed.

  And the rebel line collapsed.

  It had fought since dawn, but now, in the face of yet more Yankee attackers, the defense disintegrated. The collapse began with one battalion, then the panic spread to the neighboring units and suddenly a whole brigade was running. Starbuck was not aware of the panic at first. He had heard the massive volley off to his right and he was aware of screams and cheers from the edge of the woods, but he doggedly went on loading his rifle while the Georgian officer pleaded for death, but then a nearby man called out a warning and Starbuck saw Yankees running through the smoke. He snatched up his ramrod and ran with the other rebels. Some Yankees sprinted ahead, angling in front of Starbuck in their eagerness to cut off a retreating flag. He let the ramrod drop and dragged the revolver from behind his back and fired wildly into the blue coats. A rebel sergeant swung his rifle by the barrel to bring its heavy stock down on a Yankee head. Starbuck heard the impact of the rifle butt just as a bearded Yankee lunged at him with a bayonet. Starbuck stepped aside so that the blade went past him, he thrust the revolver into the man's belly, and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. In despair, screaming, he swung his clumsy rifle so that the bullet-shattered stock slammed into the side of the Yankee's head. Starbuck could smell the man's uniform, the tobacco on his breath, then the man stumbled. Starbuck kicked him hard and ran on. He stumbled over cornstalks, canister balls, and bodies. There were cheers behind and panic in front. He expected a bullet at any second and dropped the broken rifle to gain a mite of speed.

  The momentum of the Yankees' attack carried them down through the East Woods and caused more rebels to join the flight. The Northern guns on the Hagerstown Pike hurried the fugitives along with round after round of case shot. The rebels tumbled out of the yard of the burned farm, they abandoned the graveyard, they fled for the trees in the west and so abandoned the morning's hard-fought battlefield to the Yankees. Here and there groups of men retreated slowly, in ranks, firing as they went, but most of the gray-clad infantry simply ran and only slowed when they realized that there was no Yankee pursuit. The Northerners were as confused as the rebels and, though some men pushed doggedly on, more stopped in the cornfield to reload and fire at the rapidly vanishing enemy. Starbuck recognized some men from Faulconer's Legion and joined them. He plucked up a Springfield rifle from a dead Texan and checked that it worked. A handful of the Yellowlegs were still with him, and then, on the Smoketown Road, he saw Lucifer and Imp walking west with Potter's company. He joined them, then crossed the dirt ruts of the Hagerstown Pike to" reach the shadows of the trees beyond.

  Colonel Swynyard was shouting his own name in an attempt to rally his brigade. Handfuls of men joined him, milling in confusion among the woods just north of the Dunker church. Behind them now was a stretch of pastureland that had been turned into hell's outpost—a swathe of killing ground littered with bodies and slick with blood, a smoke-hung graveyard of the unburied dead over which Yankee battalions advanced in uncoordinated pursuit of the rebel fugitives. Shell bursts punctured the pasture, scattering dead men and hurrying the last rebels toward the West Woods.

  Some of the panicking rebels had not stopped in the West Woods, but had kept going into the farmlands beyond. Rebel cavalry were dispatched to round them up and send them back to the West Woods, where officers and sergeants bellowed out unit names. Here and there the vestiges of companies formed, and shattered battalions gathered under their torn and stained colors. Other officers did not worry about rejoining their battalions, but just tugged and pushed men into makeshift companies at the wood's edge and told them to open fire on the pursuing enemy. A wagon was whipped up the Hagerstown Pike and dropped off boxes of artillery ammunition for the gun teams that had hastily deployed in front of the woods. The wagon's team was hit by a Yankee shell and dying horses screamed as gallons of their blood washed down the road's deep ruts. The ground in front of the rebel batteries was at last free of fugitives and the gunners opened fire
with canister that dropped more dead among the army of corpses that lay beneath the smoke.

  For a moment it seemed as though the guns would hold the Northern advance, then lines of blue troops appeared in the smoke that hazed the land east of the batteries. Gunners desperately tried to handspike the guns about to face this new threat, but then a rippling volley whipped a storm of minie bullets that clanged off cannon barrels, drove splinters from gun wheels, and threw down the gunners. In the pause while the infantry reloaded, the surviving gun captains brought up their horse teams and dragged the guns back through the trees. A Yankee cheer sounded, then a battalion charged into the vacated ground where the grass had been flattened and scorched by the cannon blasts. No one opposed them and the troops, a big Pennsylvanian regiment, found their lodgment in the West Woods. They captured the Dunker church, which was filled with wounded men, and there they stopped, for the woods around them were alive with rebel survivors who began a galling fire. The Pennsylvanian commander sent messengers to the rear with pleas for support and ammunition. Some Northern guns came to help the Pennsylvanians, but the gunners unlimbered too close to the woods and rebel sharpshooters raked them with fire. The guns pulled back, one hauled by infantry because all its horses had been shot. The abandoned wagon had caught fire and its remaining load of sheik banged off one by one to vomit a filthy smoke into the white-hot sky.

  General Jackson raged up and down the wood shouting at men to form in company, to find their battalions, to turn and fight. He knew this was the moment for the Yankees to strike. If one Northern corps, even one brigade, should reinforce the Pennsylvanian lodgment about the Dunker church and carry the attack straight on through the woods, then the dizzied men in gray would break. The Yankees would win the day, the rebel army would be turned into a rabble fleeing for a narrow ford, and by winter the streets of Richmond would be filled with strutting Yankees. General Lee, recognizing the same danger, was assembling a line of guns on a ridge to the west of the woods so that if the triumphant Yankees did burst through the trees, they would be met by a killing barrage that might at least slow the pursuers and give his men time to make a fighting retreat toward the Potomac.

  But the Yankees were as dazed as the rebels. The swift' ness of the Northern advance had left their units scattered across the field. All of the ground that lay east of the Hagerstown Pike and north of the Dunker church was in Yankee hands, and some Northern units had crossed the Pike to find a dangerous shelter in the edge of the West Woods, but the reinforcements they needed were nowhere in sight. Rebel guns in the south of the battlefield were thrashing the beaten ground with shellfire and rebel infantry was firing from the woods, and so the pursuit stalled as the Yankees, like the rebels, tried to pull order out of chaos.

  The rebel panic in the West Woods subsided. Men counted their cartridges and some glanced nervously behind in an effort to spot a route away from the carnage, but as the Northern firing died away the rebels began to reform. One by one the companies were remade, the gaps in the line were mended, and the cartridges replenished.

  "I borrowed poor Haxall's watch," Colonel Swynyard joined Starbuck. "He won't need it in heaven, poor man, but I'll send it to his wife."

  "He's dead?" Starbuck asked.

  Swynyard nodded, then shook the watch and held it to his ear. "It seems to be working," he said dubiously, then looked at the watch's face. "Almost nine o'clock," Swynyard said, and Starbuck immediately frowned and wondered why it was not getting dark. "In the morning, Nate," Swynyard said gently, "in the morning."

  The day was still young.

  Yankees walked through the East Woods and out into the cornfield. One man vomited at the sight of the field. The stench of the place was worse than a slaughterhouse. Men lay shattered, their blood spilled wide, their bowels open in death. Sightless eyes gazed through smoke, mouths were open and filled with flies. Rebel and Yankee lay together. The wounded called for help, some wept, some called for a merciful shot to the head. A few, pitifully few, stretcher bearers had begun work. A chaplain, overcome by the horror, fell to his knees at the edge of the trees and let tears fall onto an open Bible. Other men moved among the horror in search of plunder; they carried pliers to take gold-capped teeth and knives to cut off wedding ring fingers or else to quiet their victims' protests. A battery of guns checked at the cornfield's edge, the team's drivers unwilling to run their heavy weapons over the field of corpses, but an officer shouted at them to damn their squeamishness and so they cracked their whips and forced the guns across the bodies. Blood turned black. Steam came from the deeper blood pools. The sun was climbing, the very last mist had gone from the creek, and the day's sweltering heat was rising.

  Mister Kroeger, the farmer who had undertaken to be the Yankees' guide to the Snaveley Ford, insisted on visiting his farm first. The cows needed milking, but as no orders had come from McClellan ordering an attack across the river, no one thought to hurry the farmer. The Yankee troops detailed to cross the bridge on the lower creek stared from their hiding places and wondered how in the name of a merciful God they were supposed to cross several hundred yards of open land, then cram themselves onto a bridge just twelve feet wide, all the while being raked by the rebels in the rifle pits who waited on the farther bank.

  A new and heavier corps of Northern troops forded the river well to the north of the lower bridge. Their crossing was not opposed and the fresh troops began the long climb to the plateau where they would serve to reinforce the Yankees who had beaten the rebels out of the East Woods and the cornfield. Thirteen thousand men climbed the hill, their bands playing and colors flying as they drew nearer and nearer to the death-house stench that waited at the slope's summit. The long lines of advancing men paused and broke apart whenever they reached a rail fence, but once over the fence the long ranks reformed and pushed on. It would take the newcomers some fair time to reach the summit, and once there they would need to be shown where to attack, and all that while the rebels were desperately patching together the northern half of their army and so, for a while, the plateau was eerily silent. Once in a while a gun would fire or a rifle crack, but both sides were drawing breath.

  One man, at least, had survived the battle and would fight in it no more. Billy Blythe waited until the sound of firing had died away and until the first excited rush of storming Yankee troops was long gone past his hiding place, and only then did he free himself from the deadweight of the men who-concealed him. The woods were full of curious Yankees, but no one took any particular notice of Billy Blythe in his loose blue coat. He staggered to make himself look like one of the many wounded men waiting for help under the cover of the trees.

  He found a dead rebel officer behind a rotting trunk and took the man's belt with its holstered Whitney revolver. Then, still staggering, he made his way east to the Smoketown Road, where a press of vehicles jammed the dirt track and its grass verges. Wagons were bringing new ammunition for the cannons and ambulances were lining up for the wounded. One of the ambulances was carrying the dying body of General Mansfield, who had been shot off his horse as he had tried to urge his men into the East Woods. "Can you walk back?" a sergeant shouted at Blythe.

  Blythe mumbled incoherently and lurched more impressively.

  "Come on, lad, up with you!" The sergeant boosted Blythe's heavy body onto the bed of an empty ammunition wagon that would trundle north to Smoketown before crossing the creek by the upper bridge.

  Blythe lay in the wagon and stared at the sky. He smiled. Caton Rothwell, one of the two men who had sworn to kill him, was dead, shot in the back by Blythe himself, and Blythe had sown enough discord to be fairly sure that Starbuck would be removed before the day was through. He chuckled as he admired his own cleverness. Damn it, he thought, but there were few men to touch Billy Blythe for sheer cunning. He fingered his commission, then struggled to sit up. A Pennsylvanian Bucktail officer, wounded in the leg, sat beside him and offered him a cigar. "Hell," the Pennsylvanian said.

  "Life is sure swee
t," Blythe said.

  The Pennsylvanian frowned at Blythe's accent. "Are you a reb?" he asked.

  "A major in your army, Captain," Blythe promoted himself to celebrate his survival. "I was never a man to change allegiance to my country, certainly not on account of a pack of Sambos." He accepted the Pennsylvanian's cigar. "Hell," he went on, "I can understand fighting over land or women, but over darkies?" Blythe shook his head. "Just plain don't make sense."

  The Captain leaned back on the wagon's sideboard. "Jesus," he said faintly, still shaking after his time in the cornfield.

  "Praise His name," Blythe said, "praise His holy name." For Billy Blythe was safe.

  Captain Dennison was safe too. He was in the West Woods, where he had found Sergeant Case. The two men were some twenty yards behind the remnants of Starbuck's battalion, where they were concealed in the muddle of disorganized and leaderless men. "Captain Tumlin didn't make it," Dennison said nervously, "leastwise I ain't seen him. And Cartwright's dead. So's Dan Lippincott."

  "So the battalion's yours," Case said, and then, after a pause, "or it will be when Starbuck's dead."

  Dennison shuddered. He had been scared half to death by the retreat across the open country, a retreat marked by the whistle of minie bullets and the jeers of Yankees and the thump of exploding shells.

  "Yours," Case said again, "and you promised to give me back my company. As a captain."

  "I did," Dennison agreed.

  Case pushed a rifle into Dennison's hands. "It fires true," he said, "and it's loaded."

  Dennison stared at the gun as though he had never seen such a thing before. "Swynyard might not confirm me," he said after a while.

  "Bloody hell, Captain, we all have to take our chances," Case said, then levered down the trigger guard of his captured Sharps rifle to make sure a round was in the breech. It was. That meant he had three rounds in all, and after they were fired the gun would be useless. Dennison looked up at Starbuck and tentatively raised the rifle to his shoulder, but Case pushed it down. "Not now, Captain," he said scornfully. "Wait till the Yankees come again. Wait till there's plenty of noise."