The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (17 page)

But they would need more than one charming rogue to unite them. Starbuck had done his best in the two days before this journey began. He had persuaded Colonel Hoi-borrow to produce boots, ammunition, canteens, and even the battalion's arrears of pay. He had marched the men up and down the Brook Turnpike and had rewarded them with cider from Broome's Tavern after one particularly grueling march, though he doubted that either the reward or the experience would matter much when they joined Jackson's hard-marching troops. He had made them load their antiquated muskets with buck and ball, an antiquated charge of shot that fired a musket ball with a scatter of buckshot, then he had purloined two dozen of Camp Lee's shabbiest tents to use as a target. The first volley had riddled the tents' ridges with holes but left the lower canvas almost unmarked, and Starbuck had made the men inspect the tents. "The Yankees don't stand high as a ridge," he had told them. "You're shooting high. Aim at their balls, even their knees, but aim low." They had fired a second volley and this one had ripped the worn canvas at the right height. He could spare no more ammunition for such target practice, but just hoped the Yellowlegs remembered the lesson when the men in blue were advancing.

He had talked to the men, not telling them that they were being given a second chance, but saying instead that they were needed up north. "What happened to you at Malvern Hill," he said, "could have happened to anyone. Hell, it almost happened to me at the first battle." At Malvern Hill, he had learned, part of the battalion broke and ran after a Yankee shell had struck plumb on their Colonel's horse while he was leading them forward. The horse had been torn into bloody shreds that had blown back into the faces of the center companies, and that shock introduction to war had been enough to scare a handful of men into full retreat. The others, thinking they were being ambushed, followed. They were not the first battalion to inexplicably break into flight, but it was their misfortune to do it a long way from where the real fighting was going on and in full view of a score of other battalions. The shame clung to them still and Starbuck knew that only battle could wash it away. "The time will come," he told the battalion, "when men will be proud to say they were a Yellowleg."

Starbuck had talked to the officers and then to the sergeants. The officers had been sullen and the sergeants uncooperative. "The men ain't ready for battle," Sergeant Case insisted.

"No one's ready," Starbuck had answered, "but we've still got to fight- If we wait till we're ready, Sergeant Case, the Yankees will have conquered us."

"Ain't conquered us yet," Case answered, "and from what I hear, sir," he managed to invest the honorific with a dripping scorn, "we're the ones doing the conquering. Just ain't proper to take these poor boys off to a war they ain't ready to fight."

"I thought you were supposed to have got them ready," Starbuck said, unwisely letting himself be drawn into the argument.

"We're doing our job, sir," Case said, carefully enrolling the other sergeants onto his side of the argument, "but as any regular soldier will tell you, sir, a good sergeant's work can be undone in a minute by a glory-boy." He offered Starbuck a feral grin. "Glory-boy, sir. Young officer wanting to be famous, sir, and expecting the lads to die for his fame. Bloody shame, sir."

"We go tomorrow," Starbuck had said, ignoring Case. "The men will cook three days of rations and draw ammunition tonight." He had walked away, ignoring Case's snort of derision. Starbuck knew he had handled the confrontation badly. Another enemy, he thought wearily, another damned enemy.

"So what's happening?" Potter now asked as the train swayed up the incline.

"Wish I knew."

"But we're going to fight?"

"I reckon."

"But we don't know where."

Starbuck shook his head. "Get to Winchester and fetch new orders. That's what I'm told."

Potter drew on his cigar. "You reckon the men are ready to fight?" he asked.

"Do you?" Starbuck turned the question back.

"No."

"Nor me," Starbuck admitted. "But if we'd waited all winter they wouldn't be any more ready. It ain't their training that's wrong, it's their morale."

"Shoot Sergeant Case, that'll cheer them up," Potter suggested.

"Give them a battle," Starbuck said. "Give them a victory." Though how he was to do that with his present officers and sergeants, he did not know. Even to get the men as far as a battlefield, Starbuck thought, would be some kind of miracle. "You were at Shiloh, right?" he asked Potter.

"I was," Potter said, "but I have to confess it was mostly a blur. I wasn't exactly drunk, but sober don't describe it either. But I do remember an exhilaration, which is odd, don't you think? But George Washington said the same, do you remember? When he wrote how he was elated by the sound of bullets? Is it, you think, because we seek sensation? Like being a gambler?"

"I reckon I've wagered enough," Starbuck said grimly.

"Ah," Potter said, understanding. "I only had the one battle."

"Manassas twice," Starbuck said bleakly, "God knows how many times in the defense of Richmond, Leesburg, the fight at Cedar Mountain. Some brawl in the rain a few days back," he shrugged. "Enough."

"But more to come," Potter said.

"Yes." Starbuck spat a shred of tobacco under the train wheels. "And still there are some sons of bitches who think I can't be trusted because I'm a Yankee."

"So why are you fighting for the South?" Potter asked.

"That, Potter," Starbuck said, "is a question I don't need to answer."

The two men fell silent as the train wheels screeched on a curve. The stink of a hot axle-box's grease soured the woodsmoke aroma of the locomotive. They had climbed high enough now for the eastern land to lie revealed beneath the moon. A scatter of tiny lights showed faraway villages or farms, while the livid glow of small grass fires betrayed the double-curving path the train had followed up the gentle slope. "You ever done any skirmishing?" Starbuck asked suddenly. "No."

"Reckon you could handle it?" Starbuck asked.

Potter, faced with
a serious question, seemed non
plussed. "Why me?" he finally asked.

"Because the captain in charge of skirmishers has to be an independent son of a bitch who ain't afraid to take risks, that's why."

"A captain?" Potter asked.

"You heard me."

Potter drew on his cigar. "Sure," he said, "I guess."

"You get your own company," Starbuck said. "Forty men. You get the thirty rifles, too." He had been thinking about this all day and finally decided to take the plunge. None of the four existing captains struck him as men willing to take on responsibility, but Potter had an impudent nature that might fit him for the skirmish line. "You know what skirmishers do?"

"Crudely," Potter said.

"You go out ahead of the battalion. Spread out, use cover, and shoot the damn Yankee skirmishers. You fight those sons of bitches hard to push them back so you can start killing their main battle line before the rest of us arrive. Win the skirmisher's battle, Potter, and you're halfway to winning the real thing." He paused to suck smoke into his lungs. "We won't announce it till we've done a day's real marching. Let's see which men can take the pace and which can't. There's no point in putting weaklings into the skirmish line."

"I assume," Potter said, "that you were a skirmisher?"

"For a time, yes."

"Then I shall be honored."

"Damn the honor," Starbuck said. "Just stay sober and shoot straight."

"Yes, sir." Potter grinned. "Martha will be pleased to be a captain's wife."

"So don't disappoint her."

"I fear my darling Martha is doomed to disappointment. She believes it is possible, even essential, for all of us to be Sunday school good. Honesty is the best policy, she tells me, a stitch in time saves nine, never a borrower nor a lender be, be honest as the day is long, do unto others, and all that noble stuff, but I'm not sure any of that's possible if you have a thirst and a little imagination." He tossed the stub of his cigar off the platform. "Do you ever wish the war would last forever?"

"No."

"I do. Someone to feed me, to clothe me, to pick me up every time my wings fold. You know what I'm frightened of, Starbuck? I'm frightened of peace, when there'll be no army to be my refuge. There'll just be people expecting me to make a living. Now that's hard, that's hard, that's real cruel, that is. What the hell will I do?"

"Work," Starbuck said.

Potter laughed. "And what will you do, Major
Starbuck
?" he asked knowingly.

Hell if I know, Starbuck thought, hell if I know. "Work," he said grimly.

"Stern Major Starbuck," Potter said, but Starbuck had gone back into the car. Potter shook his head and watched the passing night and thought of all the trains clanking and banging and thrusting through this night carrying their loads of blue-coated troops to meet this train that rattled and screeched and shuddered its lonely way north.

All mad, he thought, all mad. As flies to wanton boys. He could have wept.

If there was one thing that terrified Belvedere Delaney it was the fear of being discovered and captured, for he knew only too well what his fate would be. The cell in a Richmond prison, the merciless questions, the trial before scornful men, and the vengeful crowd staring white-faced at the high scaffold where he would stand with a rope about his neck. He had heard that men pissed themselves when they were hung, and that if the executioner bungled the job, and the executioner usually did bungle it, then death was agonizingly slow. The onlookers would jeer while he pissed himself and as the rope bit into his neck. The very thought made his bowels feel liquid.

He was no hero. He had never thought of himself as a hero, but merely as a quick-witted, amoral, genial sort of fellow. It amused him to make money, just as it amused him to be generous. Every man thought Delaney a friend, and Delaney took care to keep it that way. He disliked rancor, reserving his enmities for his private thoughts, and if he did wish to hurt someone he would do it so secretly that the victim would never suspect that Delaney had engineered the misfortune. It was thus that Delaney had betrayed Starbuck during the North's spring campaign to capture Richmond, and Starbuck had come as close as a whisker to a Northern scaffold, and Delaney would have genuinely regretted that fate, but he had never once regretted his part in so nearly causing it. Delaney had been pleased when Starbuck returned, delighted even, for he liked Starbuck, but he would still betray him tomorrow if he thought there was profit in the treachery. Delaney did not feel badly about such a contradiction; he did not even perceive it as a contradiction, merely as fate. Some

Englishman had just written a book that was upsetting all the preachers because it implied that man, like all other species, had not originated in a divine moment of creation, but was muckily desc
ended from God knows what primi
tive things with tails and claws and bloody teeth. Delaney could not recall the author's name, but one phrase from his book had lodged in Delaney's mind: the survival of the fittest. Well, Delaney would survive.

And survival was his own responsibility, which was why Belvedere Delaney took such exquisite care not to betray his own treachery. Colonel Thorne knew he was a Northern spy, and maybe Thorne had confided in one or two others, though Delaney had asked him not to, but other than Thorne the only human being who knew Delaney's true loyalty was his manservant, George. Delaney was punctilious in describing George as a manservant, he never called him a slave, though he was one, and he treated George with a grave courtesy. "We make each other comfortable," Delaney liked to say, and George, hearing the description, would concur with a smile. When visitors came to Delaney's exquisite apartment on Richmond's Grace Street the servant would behave like any other, though when Delaney and George were alone it seemed they were more like companions than master and slave, and some shrewd folk had scented that closeness and were amused by it. It was simply another part of Delaney's eccentricities and they supposed that master and slave would grow old together and that, if Delaney died first, George would inherit much of his master's wealth along with his own freedom. George had even taken Delaney as his surname.

On the occasions when Delaney had cause to send news to Thorne it had always been George who took the risks. It was George who carried the messages to the man in

Richmond who passed them on northward, but George could not carry the messages now. George was as uncomfortable as his master at being among the rebel army, and George had no skills that could take him through a soldier's picket line. George could dress a salad, roast a duck, or whip up an exquisite custard. He could reduce a sauce to perfection, had a nose for fine wine, and could play with equal facility upon a flute or violin. He could take a coat made at Richmond's finest tailors and, with a few hours' work, so remake it that a man would swear it came from Paris or London. George had a connoisseur's eye for fine porcelain and many a time he had returned to Delaney's apartment with news of a fine piece of Meissen or Limoges being sold by a family impoverished by the war and which would fill a gap in his master's collection, but George Delaney was no man for hiding in thickets like a sharpshooter or riding across country like one of Jeb Stuart's cavaliers.