The Bloody Ground

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Fire!" Starbuck shouted. Dimly over the crack of his rifles he heard the clatter of bullets striking the cannon. He hauled out his revolver. "Now charge!"

  He ran from the trees and could see that the gunners had been hit hard. The gun captain was on his knees, holding his belly with one hand and the gun's wheel with another. Two other men were down while the rest of the crew hesitated between reloading and looking for the danger.

  The Yellowlegs charged. The gun lay beyond the junction of the turnpike and the Smoketown Road and the remnants of two sets of fences lay in their path, but the men leaped the rails and stumbled on as fast as their tired legs would carry them. It was a race now between the weary infantrymen and the hard-hit gun crew, who began trying to handspike the Napoleon round to face the attack. A wounded gunner was holding a charge of canister, ready to plunge it down the barrel, then he saw the race was lost and he just dropped the charge and fled toward the east, his suspenders flapping about his legs as he limped away.

  The second gun tried to save the first, but before its gunners could charge the barrel and turn the gun, the defenders of the Dunker church gave way. They had been attacked from two sides, caught in a screaming vice of vengeful gray, and the thousand Yankees under General Greene had taken enough. They scattered and fled, and the gunners of the second Napoleon simply brought up their horses, limbered up the gun, and galloped away. Starbuck's men, still screaming their challenge, pounced on the first gun, slapping its hot barrel and shouting their victory while, just yards away, the broken Yankees streamed past, pursued by rifle fire from the woods. Starbuck's men watched them go, too tired to make an effort to interfere. A wounded gunner begged for water and one of Starbuck's men knelt beside the man and tipped a canteen to his lips. "Never knew you boys were there," the gunner said. He struggled to sit up and managed at last to prop himself against his gun's wheel. "They said it only was all our boys in the trees." He sighed, then felt in his pocket to bring out a wrapped tintype of a woman that he set on his lap. He stared at the image.

  "We'll find you a doctor," Starbuck promised.

  The man looked up at Starbuck briefly, then stared again at the tintype. "Too late for doctors," he said. "One of you boys put a bullet in my guts. Don't hurt much, not yet, but there isn't a doctor born who can help. If I was a dog you'd have put me down by now." He gave the portrait a gentle touch. "Prettiest girl in Fitchburg," he said softly, "and we've only been married two months." He paused, closed his eyes as a spasm of pain flickered deep in his guts, then looked up at Starbuck. "Where you boys from?" he asked.

  "Virginia."

  "That's her name," the gunner said, "Virginia Simmons."

  Starbuck crouched beside the man. "She is pretty," he said. The photograph showed a slender, fair-haired girl with an anxious face. "And I reckon you'll see her again," he added.

  "Not this side of the pearly gates," the gunner said. He had grown a wispy brown beard in an evident attempt to make himself look older. He glanced at the revolver in Starbuck's hand, then up into Starbuck's eyes. "You an officer?"

  "Yes."

  "You reckon there's a heaven?" Starbuck paused, struck by the intensity of the question. "Yes," he said gently, "I know there is." "Me, too," the gunner said.

  " 'I know that my Redeemer liveth,'" Starbuck quoted. The gunner nodded, then looked back at his wife. "And

  I'll be waiting for you, girl," he said, "with coffee on the boil." He smiled. "She always likes her coffee scalding hot." A tear showed in his eye. "Never knew you boys were there," he said in a weaker voice.

  Some of the rebels had pursued the broken Yankees out into the pastureland, but a barrage of canister drove them back. One musket ball struck the barrel of the captured cannon and Starbuck ordered his men back to the trees. He stooped to the wounded gunner to see if the man wanted to be carried back, but the man was already dead. His lap was puddled with blood, his eyes were wide open, and a fly was crawling into his mouth. Starbuck left him.

  Back at the tree line some of his men put their heads on their arms and slept. Others stared sightlessly east where the gunsmoke lay like a sea-fog, while in the corn, the pastures, and the ravaged woods, the wounded cried on unheeded.

  The heat of the battle had moved south, leaving the scene of the morning's fighting full of exhausted survivors too weak to fight more. Now it was the sunken road that acted like a giant meat grinder. Battalion after battalion walked into the rebel fire, and battalion after battalion died on the open ground, and still more men came from the east to add their deaths to the day's rich toll.

  But the rebels were dying as well. The road might be a defender's dream, but it had one shortcoming. It ran directly eastward from the Hagerstown Pike, then bent sharply south and east so that once the Yankees had managed to place a battery on a line directly east of the road's first stretch, they were able to enfilade the stubborn Confederate defenders. Shells plunged into the sunken road and the steep banks magnified the carnage of each explosion. The fire of the defenders grew weaker, yet still they drove back one attack after another. The Irishmen of New York nearly broke through. They had been told that the Confederates were the friends of the British and that was incentive enough to drive the green flags forward. The flags had golden Irish harps embroidered on the green and the Irishmen carried the harps further forward than any flag had yet reached, but there was no bravery sufficient to carry men through the last few murderous yards of fire. One black-bearded giant of a man screamed his war cry in Gaelic and urged his compatriots on as though he could win the war and avenge his people single-handed, but a rebel's bullet put the man down, and the charge, like so many others, was finally shredded into raw and bloody tatters by the remorseless rifle fire. The Irish made a new line of bodies, closer than any others to the lane's fiery lip, while in the lane itself, where the shells plunged to tear dead bodies into mincemeat, the rebel dead thickened.

  Other men died on the lower creek, where every effort to take the Rohrbach Bridge had failed. The corpses lay like a barrier on the east bank and the very sight of so many dead served as a deterrent to the waiting Yankee battalions, who knew their turn must come to assault the deadly passage. Thorne came there too, and came with the authority of his enemy McClellan. He found General Burnside on the hill overlooking the bridge. "Where the hell are the guns?" Thorne snarled.

  General Burnside, astonished at being addressed in such a peremptory fashion, sounded defensive. "Waiting to cross," he explained, gesturing toward a lane behind the hill where the guns were sheltering.

  "You need them up here," Thorne insisted.

  "But there are no roads," an aide protested.

  "Then make a road!" Thorne shouted. "Get a thousand men if you have to, but drag the damn things up here. Now! Two guns, twelve-pounders, canister and case shot only. And for Christ's sake, hurry!"

  South of the Potomac, marching in swirls of dust under the merciless sun, the Light Division was also being chivvied and harried to keep moving, to keep moving, always to keep moving toward the sound of the killing.

  While on the Pry house lawn General McClellan enjoyed his lunch.

  TWO NAPOLEONS WERE fetched to the summit of the hill above the Rohrbach Bridge and their presence turned the battle for the crossing. The very first blast of canister whipped a half-dozen sharpshooters out of their hiding places in the tops of the trees on the western bank, and left others dangling lifelessly from the ropes that had held them safe to the branches. The second and third discharges of canister decimated the rebel defenders in their rifle pits.

  A Pennsylvania battalion, promised a keg of whiskey if they took the bridge, charged forward. There were still enough rebels to kill the leading ranks, but the men behind leaped over their dead and stormed onto the stone roadway that arched across the creek. More Yankees followed, jostling between the balustrades as they hurried to carry their revenge to the rebels, who scrambled hurriedly out of their pits and up over the hill.

  Downstream, at Snaveley's
Ford, another brigade at last made the crossing to the western bank and the Yankees were finally loose in Lee's rear, but it was one thing to be across the creek and quite another to form the battalions and brigades into their columns. Guns had to be fetched over the creek, disarray had to be straightened, and the ground had to be reconnoitered. Thorne cursed McClellan for keeping the army's cavalry at headquarters where it served no purpose. If the cavalry could have been

  unleashed here, behind the rebel army, he could have struck panic into Lee's men, but the Northern cavalry was two miles away and General Burnside would not advance his infantry until all was ready. A handful of rebel skirmishers harried the Northerners as they laboriously marched unit after unit across the river. Thorne raged at Burnside for speed, but Burnside would not be hurried. "The day's young yet," he said, indicating the brevity of the shadows, "and there's no need for impetuosity. We shall do it properly. Besides," Burnside went on as though his next point was irrefutable, "we can't attack till the infantry is resupplied with ammunition. Their pouches are empty, Thorne, empty. Men can't fight with empty pouches."

  Thorne wondered how any general could have failed to carry sufficient ammunition for a day's hard fighting, but he bit back the comment. The day was indeed young, and it needed to be, for Burnside's units were crossing the bridge at a snail's pace and, once over the river, they lingered aimlessly until staff officers arrived to direct them to their proper places. Burnside's advance, when it came, would be a slow, grinding assault instead of a lightning strike, and Thorne could only pray that Lee did not choose to retreat before the North's trap swung ponderously shut. He forced his horse up the steep hill where the rebel defenders had fought for so long and, once at the summit, he stared across an empty landscape of cornfields, shade trees, and pastureland, and, in the heat-hazed distance where it was marked by the dust kicked up by a trail of ambulances going slowly south toward the river, he could see the enemy's only route home. A rebel skirmisher fired at Thorne and the bullet whipped close beside his ear. Thorne saw the patch of smoke and reckoned the shot had been all of four hundred yards. He raised his hat in ironic salute to a well-aimed near miss, then turned his horse down from the high ground.

  The sunken lane at last fell. The Yankees, capturing the road, found they could not cross the track without stepping on the bodies of its defenders, and though those defenders had failed, they had hurt their attackers so hard that the Yankees were in no fit state to advance further.

  The battle, which had burned so fierce, smoldered in the afternoon. Weary men staggered about the plateau that was hung with smoke and smothered with the foul miasma of bodies beginning to rot in the hot sun. Batteries waited for new ammunition, infantry counted their cartridges, and officers counted their men. Units that had started the day five hundred strong were less than a hundred now. The dead possessed the field, while the living searched for water and peered into the eye-stinging smoke for a sign of the enemy.

  The rebels were hardest hit. There were no reserves left, not one man, and so Lee made a barrier of artillery to defend Sharpsburg and its single road, which led back to the Confederacy. The guns were just in place when a weary messenger on a tired, dust-stained, and sweat-whitened horse came up the track from the town. Hill's Light Division had reached the ford. The Confederacy's last troops were crossing the river and coming north.

  The rest of Lee's army waited. They knew the mauled Yankees were making ready and that soon the blue ranks would appear over the brow of the plateau and the fighting would begin again. The dead who had been searched for ammunition were searched again and the precious cartridges shared out. There was no hot water to clean out the fouled barrels of the rifles, nor any urine, for the men were parched dry by thirst and sweat. They waited.

  The spring that would drive the Yankees' trap shut was coiling itself tight as Burnside's men slowly readied themselves for the advance, but General McClellan could not shake the northern part of the battlefield from his fears. It was from that northern sector, which had been harrowed by death all morning, that he expected the great rebel counterattack that would jeopardize his army's existence. One of his generals reported imminent disaster in those northern fields, while another claimed that with one more effort the North could sweep the rebels out of the West Woods and back through Sharpsburg altogether, and so fierce was their argument that once his lunch was taken McClellan crossed the creek for the first and only time that day. He met his generals, he listened to their arguments, and then he pronounced his verdict. Caution, he declared, was best. The generals must hold their ground against the worst the rebels could throw against them, but they were to make no more attacks. The enemy, he said, must not be provoked and then, with that decided, McClellan went back to his armchair, from where he sought reassurance that his heavy reserve of men was still in place to meet the rebel attack he knew must be coming. After all, as he explained to Pinkerton, the rebels did outnumber him.

  "That they do, chief, that they do," Pinkerton agreed enthusiastically. "Hordes of the scoundrels, just hordes!" The Scotsman blew his nose vigorously, then unfolded the handkerchief to inspect the result. "It's a miracle we've done as well as we have, chief," he opined, still staring at the handkerchief. "Nothing short of a miracle."

  McClellan, who rather thought it was his superior generalship that had staved off disaster all day, grunted, then stooped to the telescope to watch as the troops in the center of the field at last began their advance from the sunken lane. Their job was to hold Lee's men in

  Sharpsburg while Burnside cut behind them. It was a grand sight, McClellan thought. Thousands of men marched beneath their flags. Wisps of smoke drifted across the telescope's lens, giving the great attack a fine romantic flavor.

  It was less romantic in the ranks. There, advancing across open fields toward the massive gun line assembled on the hill above the village, the North suffered as the smoldering battle burst again into livid flame. The cannons' long range meant the infantry had no chance of replying, but could only trudge through the smoke of the explosions and across the blood of their comrades until it was their turn to be hit. Ahead of them was the skyline above the village, but that skyline was rimmed by guns that pumped tongues of flame and billows of smoke. The shells screamed and wailed and cracked and killed, while from beyond the creek the heavy Federal guns returned the fire with big shells that rumbled in the sky to flower in bloody gouts on the rebel artillery line.

  Burnside's men started forward at last. There, and only there on all the battlefield, a band played as the flags were carried up the hill to begin the grand attack that would cut the retreat of the rebel army.

  For at last the Northern trap was swinging shut and the long day's killing was coming to its climax.

  The Yankees in the North and East Woods were quiet, but the northern flank of the Federal advance on Sharpsburg was visible from the woods about the Dunker church and those men, like the larger mass that advanced from the captured sunken lane, were met by the horror of Lee's artillery line. Some of Starbuck's men fired their rifles at the distant enemy, but most were content to shelter in the trees and watch as the artillery explosions gouged the enemy. Their own gun, the Napoleon they had captured, stood fifty yards away. Potter had begun to carve a legend on the gun's trail, "A gift from the Yellowlegs" but the hardness of the wood had blunted his small pocket-knife and he had abandoned his efforts. "It's odd," he said to Starbuck now, "but one day this will all be in the history books."

  "Odd?" Starbuck frowned as he tried to wrench his thoughts from his parched weariness to Potter's airy statement. "Why odd?"

  "Because I guess I never thought of America as a place where history is made," Potter said, "at least, not since the Revolution. History belongs to the rest of the world. Crimea, Napoleon, Garibaldi, the Indian mutiny." He shrugged. "We came to America to escape history, isn't that right?"

  "We're making it now," Starbuck said curtly.

  "Then we'd better make sure we win," Potter sai
d, "because history is written by the winners." He yawned. "Do I have permission to get drunk?"

  "Not yet. This thing ain't over."

  Potter grimaced, then stared at the cannon. "I've always wanted to fire a cannon," Potter said wistfully.

  "Me too," Starbuck said.

  "How difficult can it be?" Potter inquired. "Ain't nothing but an oversized rifle. A man don't need a college degree."

  Starbuck gazed at the enemy, whose enthusiasm had been blunted by the day's carnage so that their advance now wavered under the rain of artillery shells. Maybe another gun, opening from their flank, would push them back. "We can try," he said, encouraged by the thought that the Yankees were far enough away for their skirmishers to be inaccurate. "A couple of shots, maybe."

  "It is our gun," Potter said firmly. "We'd be sadly remiss not to check that it works before handing it over."

  "True," Starbuck hesitated, once more gauging the distance between the Napoleon and the distant Yankees. "Let's try it," he decided.

  Three of Potter's company volunteered to serve as crew, one of them the Irish saddler, John Connolly, who had a bloody bandage round his left arm but insisted he was fit enough to fight; then Lucifer insisted that he knew something of artillery, though Starbuck suspected the boy simply wanted to join in the excitement of firing a cannon.

  No Yankee noticed them as they ran forward. The gun was still pointing toward the woods by the Dunker church, so Potter and his men lifted the tail and maneuvered the heavy barrel around while Starbuck rummaged in the limber that had already yielded three full canteens of water and a boiled ham wrapped in canvas for his hungry men. Now he pulled out a bag of powder, a case shot, and a package of fuses. The instructions on the packet told him to tear off the paper, then press against the small end of the fuse. "I thought this was supposed to be easy," Starbuck said. He had extracted one of the fuses, a simple paper tube filled with powder, but he could not relate the tube to the printed instructions.