The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (34 page)

Nothing could have prevented straggling. For a time
Starbuck
had snarled at his limping, bleeding, struggling men, but one by one they dropped back in helpless weakness. The road's verges were littered with other stragglers who had dropped out of battalions further up the road, while here and there a brave soul hobbled on using his rifle as a crutch and with his feet leaving bloody footprints on the road's dust.

Starbuck's battalion at least had boots, but the boots were ill-made and were coming apart at the seams. Their real problem was plain weakness. They were unfit, and the handful of marches they had made in the last few weeks were no preparation for this hot, hard road where Jackson's staff officers goaded the troops on. Most of the other battalions were suffering from a lack of food. The army had outrun its supplies, and though the men had gorged on the Yankee delicacies captured at Harper's Ferry, that rich food had only made them ill. Now they were back on a diet of apples and corn snatched from the unharvested fields, and even the men who kept up the grueling pace were plagued by diarrhea. The column pounded on between lines of exhausted, sick men and the ever-present stench of feces.

Colonel Swynyard finally gave up trying to prevent straggling in his brigade. "It's no good, Nate," he said, "let them be." Swynyard was leading his horse. He could have ridden, as Lieutenant Colonel Maitland of the Legion rode, but he preferred to rest his horse's back and to set an example to his men.

Starbuck grudgingly let the sickest men fall out, but he would not allow any of the officers to leave the column. Billy Blythe was the worst affected. He was sweating in his tight coat and stumbling glassy-eyed, but whenever he veered toward the grass verge Starbuck would shove him onward. "You're an officer, Billy," he said, "so set an example." Blythe viciously spat out the efficacious word, but he was more frightened of Starbuck than of his weakness and so he limped on. "I thought you walked all the way south from Massachusetts," Starbuck added.

"I did."

"Hell, this is a stroll compared with that. Keep going."

Sergeant Case displayed no weakness. He marched steadily, untiringly, with Billy Blythe's bedroll over his own. When, each hour, the column halted for a ten minute rest, Sergeant Case would find water and bring it to Blythe. Starbuck watched the two and wondered if it had been they who had tried to kill him in the Harper's Ferry night, but now, under the unrelenting sun, that murder attempt seemed like a bad dream. He wondered if he had been mistaken. Maybe the shot had merely been some man's attempt to clear his musket of fouled powder, or perhaps a drunk had loosed a bullet into the night. He had seen two men running away, but that proved nothing.

Potter's company led the battalion. They lost no one to straggling, but nor should they for they were the cream of the Special Battalion. Potter marched happily enough, singing with his men, telling stories and jokes, and sometimes helping to haul the hearse with its precious load of ammunition. More ammunition was carried on the wagon, but the draft horses taken at Harper's Ferry were proving fatally weak. The wagon fell farther and farther behind, causing chaos as gun teams and battalions tried to pass it on the road.

"I assume," Potter said to Starbuck, "that there is a purpose to this exertion?"

"If Old Jack marches like this," Starbuck said, "you can be sure he's going to battle."

"You like him, don't you?" Potter observed with amusement.

"Old Jack? Yes, I do." Starbuck was faintly surprised at the admission. "You emulate him."

"Me?" Starbuck was
surprised. "Never," he said dis
missively.

"Not in the matter of God," Potter allowed, "nor, perhaps, in his eccentricities, but otherwise? Yes, you do. Single-minded Starbuck, not yielding an inch, tougher than boot leather. You despise weakness."

"This ain't a time to be weak."

"I can think of no better time," Potter said dryly. "The weak are liable to fall out and be spared the slaughter. It's you strong ones who'll march gallantly into the Yankee guns. Don't worry, Starbuck, I'll be with you, but I have to tell you there's a jug of whiskey in my pack in case things get too bad."

Starbuck smiled. "Only one?"

"Alas, only one, but it's marvelous what one bottle will achieve."

"Just keep some for me."

"A sip, maybe." Potter walked on, following the hearse with its dusty plumes. "I am astonished at my forbearance," he said after a while. "I have a whole jug and I haven't unstoppered it."

"So you are strong."

"Temporarily, maybe."

"Jackson says that strength comes from God," Starbuck said.

"He would, wouldn't he?" Potter said, casting a sidelong look at his Major. "Do I detect a soul in trouble?"

Starbuck glanced to his right to see a stretch of the Potomac showing between heavy trees. The march was taking them northward along the Potomac's southern bank, but soon, he knew, they must cross the river and thus pass into the North. "I was just thinking about God last night," he said evasively. He wondered if he should mention the murderous attempt on his life, but decided it would all sound too fanciful. "Hell," he said after a while, "when you're going into battle you're bound to think about God, aren't you?"

Potter smiled. "Has anyone determined whether Christians survive battle in greater numbers than unbelievers? I should like to know. Hell, if getting saved is my ticket to survival then you can lead me to the mercy seat right now."

"It ain't living or dying," Starbuck said, trying to ignore the burning pain in his leg muscles and the ache of the boils on his back and the harsh taste of the dust in his throat. "It's what happens after death."

"That's hardly a reason to be converted," Potter said. "I spent enough time in my father's church not to want to spend eternity with the same people," he shuddered. "Good people, yes, but oh so disapproving! I think I'll take my chances at the other destination." He laughed, then checked his amusement as a rumbling noise bruised the sky. "They've begun p
roceedings without us?" he sug
gested chidingly.

"That's not gunfire," Sta
rbuck said, "just thunder. Sum
mer thunder." There were clouds in the east and maybe by evening there would be a hard rain that might break the sweltering humidity that was making the march so hard.

A half hour later they turned and forded the Potomac River. A strong battery of Confederate artillery guarded the ford's Virginia bank, evidence that this was Lee's only way of escape if disaster struck the Confederate army. The water came up to their waists so that men had to hoist their cartridge pouches and cap boxes clear of the stream. Once on the far bank, in Yankee territory at last, they crossed the bridge over the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and began walking toward a small village just four miles eastward. "Sharpsburg," Swynyard told Starbuck, "and this," he gestured at the road up which they trudged, "is our only line of retreat. If the Yankees whip us, Nate, we'll be running for our lives down this road and if they cut us off from the ford we'll be done for."

"They won't whip us," Starbuck said grimly. Rebel encampments stretched untidily on either side of the road; evidence that the colum
n was at last nearing its desti
nation. This was the army's rear area, the place where the transport wagons and artillery parks were sited, the place where the field hospitals readied their scalpels and probes and bandages. The village of Sharpsburg itself was a small grid of neat frame houses with whitewashed porches and carefully watered yards that had been stripped bare of vegetables and fruit. Some civilians put out barrels of water for the marching column, but claimed they had no food to give. "We're starving ourselves, boys," a pregnant woman explained.

"Get your victuals off the Yankees, lads," an old man, evidently a Southe
rn supporter, shouted, "and God
bless you!"

They turned left off the village's main street onto the Hagerstown Pike, which climbed steeply toward the higher ground. A staff officer galloped down the column, found Swynyard, and directed him northward along the pike that ran straight between fields rich with clover. They passed the Dunker church, taking it for a roadside cottage, and there they turned right onto the Smoketown Road and walked the last half mile to reach a shady wood of tall elms and heavy oak. The wood stretched to the north, while south of the road was a plowed field newly sown with winter wheat. A family's graveyard was set in the field's center, and it was there that Swynyard established his headquarters. His brigade, thinned by straggling and worn out by a summer's campaigning, collapsed in the plowed field and in two fields of stubble that lay to the east. The ground here fell gently away toward the creek and Starbuck, throwing down his bedroll in the shade of the trees just across the road from the plowed field, could see Yankee guns on distant pastures across the river.

But there was no time now to reconnoiter the ground. What was left of the battalion had to be shown where to bivouac, then a working party had to go to the springhouse of the nearby farm to find water. A few stragglers limped in and a handful of others arrived on wagons that had been sent back down the road to collect the weary.
Starbuck
ordered a sullen Captain Dennison down to the town to find any other stragglers and direct them up to the high ground.

Swynyard summoned his battalion commanders to the small graveyard. He showed them where the brigade's small reserve store of ammunition was being stored, then walked the officers eastward to the rebel gunline, which overlooked the deep, wooded valley of the creek. Lee had evidently decided against defending the creek's bank, but would instead let the Northern army cross the water and then climb the steep slope into the face of his guns, rifles, and muskets. "With God's help, gentlemen," Swynyard said, "we shoot them down here."

It was an open stretch of fields, a place where men would stand in the smoke and trade volleys with a horde of Yankees coming up from the woods. Maitland had his expensive field glasses trained across the valley to a plowed field where a battery of Northern guns was being sited. "Parrott guns, by the look of them," he said, "and aimed right at us."

"Near on two miles away," John Miles, the commander of the small 13th Florida regiment opined. "Maybe the sons of bitches will lose us in the smoke."

"Hell, they'll fire at the smoke," Haxall, the Arkansas man, observed.

"Our guns will deal with them," Swynyard said, cutting the pessimism short.

Maitland had turned his attention to the group of farm buildings that stood below the graveyard on the rebel held slope. "Can we turn that farm into a fortress?" he asked Swynyard. "Our Hougoumont," he added.

"Our what?" Haxall asked.

"The chateau of Hougoumont," Maitland answered with his insufferable air of superiority. "A fortified farm that Wellington held all day against Napoleon's men. At Waterloo," he added condescendingly.

"He also fortified the farm at Mont St Jean," Swynyard said, unexpectedly trumping Maitland's knowledge of military history, "and he lost it because the French surrounded it and the poor men inside ran out of ammunition. And tomorrow the Yankees will be all round that farm. It's too far forward."

"So we just ignore it?" Maitland asked, reluctant to give up the thought of a solid stone wall between himself and the Yankee rifles.

"Yankees won't ignore it," Starbuck put in. "They'll fill the place with sharpshooters."

"So we burn it," Swynyard decided. "Miles? Your men can fire the buildings tonight?"

"Reckon they'd enjoy that, Colonel."

"Then do it," Swynyard said, then briefly sketched the brigade's dispositions. The big Virginia regiment would hold the right of the brigade line, then would come the smaller units from Florida and Arkansas, with Maitland's men of the Faulconer Legion on the left. "You're in reserve, Nate," Swynyard told Starbuck. "Keep your men in the woods. That might give them some cover from the Yankee guns."

"I thought our guns were going to silence their guns?" Maitland observed cattily.

Swynyard ignored the comment. "It'll be a plug-ugly infantry fight, gentlemen," he said grimly. "We'll have plenty of artillery, though, and the enemy's coming uphill. The side that stands longest and shoots best will win, and that's going to be us." He dismissed the officers, but put an arm into Starbuck's arm and led him northward toward the woods. "The Legion's got good men," he told
Starbuck
, "but I don't trust Maitland. He's yellow. Thinks his white skin is too precious to be punctured by a bullet. That's why your men are right beside his. If Maitland starts to go back, Nate, step in."

"Step in?" Starbuck asked. "He outranks me."

"Just step in. Hold the Legion for me till I can get rid of Maitland. May not happen, Nate. Or maybe the good

Lord will see fit to take me home tomorrow, in which case Maitland takes over the whole brigade, and God help these men if he does." Swynyard stopped and stared down the long slope. "Just have to shoot them down, Nate, just shoot them down." He said it sadly, imagining the blue masses that would swarm up the hill next morning.

But Swynyard was wrong. The Yankees might well be planning to cross the river and climb the hill, but first they intended a flank attack and late that afternoon, as Starbuck's men were mauling the trees and raiding the remnants of rail fences for their camp fires, a mass of Northern troops crossed the creek by a bridge that lay well north of the rebel positions. The Yankees climbed to the higher ground and kept marching westward until they reached the Hagerstown Pike and there they camped. Rebel pickets fired at the Yankees, and every now and then the sound of rifles crackled angry and loud as Northern skirmishers tried to drive the Confederates away, but neither side made any attempt to attack the other's main body. General Lee watched the Federal troops making their camp to his north and their presence told him what to expect in the morning. The Yankees would march south in what promised to be a massive attack straight down the Hagerstown Pike.