The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (37 page)

Some of Starbuck's men aimed their rifles. "Wait!" he called. "Wait!"

The Yankees were at last visible through the remnants of standing corn.

They were a dark line in the cornfield's mist. They were a horde of men advancing beneath their brilliant flags. They were death in blue. There were thousands of them, a mass of men, a drum-driven multitude with bayonets on their rifles.

"Two brigades, I'd guess," Swynyard said calmly.

"Wait!" Starbuck called to his men again. The Yankee attack was wide enough to overlap the cornfield, which meant that the eastern end of the blue line was now in the woods. "Tumlin!" he shouted.

"Starbuck?" Tumlin appeared at the wood's edge. The trees above him had been made ragged by Yankee sheik that had stripped some branches of leaves and ripped other branches away.

"Take Dennison's company and support Potter!"

Starbuck shouted. "The sons of bitches are coming through the trees!" Tumlin ducked out of sight without acknowledging the order and Starbuck knew he should go and make certain Dennison's company did move up through the wood, but the sight of the Yankees coming through the shattered cornfield was holding him rooted to the pastureland. The nervousness had ebbed, displaced by the need to hold his men taut.

"Co
ffman," Swynyard called the young Lieutenant. "Tell Colonel Maitland to advance in support here. He knows what to do. Go on, lad." Coffman ran.

"I'll put Truslow's company into the woods," Swynyard said, sensing Starbuck's nervousness about the battalion's right flank. A crash of exploding shells drowned the Colonel's next words. Some rebel staff officers had ridden to the Smoketown Road, from where they were staring north through big field glasses, and the Yankee gunners across the Antietam were doing their best to kill the mounted men. The salvo of shells gouged the road and its verges with craters. Smoke screened the horsemen. Somewhere a bugle was playing, its notes brazen and rousing. The Yankee drummers were rattling away.

Rebel guns fired from the woods to the west of the cornfield. They used solid shot that plowed into the Yankee lines. A flag went down, and was immediately snatched up. Starbuck had found one of the limestone ribs that hunched its way through the soil and was standing on it for a better view. He could hear hard and solid rifle fire in the woods, but none of his men was running out of the trees, so the fight there had to be under control. Truslow's company from the Legion came running up the edge of the wood and Swynyard went to divert them into the trees. If Truslow was there, Starbuck knew, then he could forget the wood.

"Wait!" Starbuck called to his men. The Yankees were at the center of the cornfield now and it was their turn to be hit by canister. The strike of the bundled shot cut down swathes of corn and drove up spurts of dust from the dry ground. Huge gaps were being torn from the Yankee ranks, but every time the dreadful scythe cut down a handful of men there were others who jumped over the fallen bodies to fill the hole. The Yankees had fixed bayonets. Their flags hung as limp as the rebel battle flags. One brave man waved his banner to and fro so that the Stars and Stripes made a fine show, but his gallantry was rewarded with a blast of canister that snatched him and the flag backward. The flag flew over the heads of the advancing men. Starbuck could hear the boots trampling the corn. He could hear the Northern sergeants shouting harshly at their men to stay in line, to close up, to keep marching. He could hear the drummer boys frantically trying to win the war with the speed of their sticks.

"Aim low!" he told his men. "Aim low. Don't waste your shots! But wait! Wait!" He wanted the first volley to be a killer.

The misted air was full of noise. Shells rumbled overhead, bullets whistled, the boots splintered the corn. Rifles cracked in the woods. The rebel line looked a perilously thin thing to withstand the Yankee hammer blow. "Wait!" Starbuck called, "wait!" Yankee skirmishers were deep in the corn, sniping at his men. A corporal came out of the line with a bloody shoulder, another man choked on his own blood.

The Yankees were two hundred paces away. They looked fresh, well-clothed, and confident. Starbuck could see their mouths open as they shouted their war cries, but he could hear nothing. He stared at them and he suddenly thought that this was how the makers of America had seen the Redcoats. The rebels then had been just as ragged, and the enemy just as well armed and smartly uniformed, and his fear was abruptly swamped by a fierce desire to shatter this overweening enemy. "Fire!" he shouted, "and kill the bastards!" He screamed the last three words and his two companies opened fire a second before the rest of the rebel line fired to blanket the pasture with rifle smoke. "Kill them!" Starbuck was shouting as he walked up and down behind the line. "Kill them!" He pushed through the files and fired his own rifle, then immediately dropped the butt to the ground to begin reloading. His pulse was racing, the fire was in his veins, the madness of battle was beginning its magic. Perfect hate casts away fear. He rammed the bullet down.

"Fire!" Captain Cartwright encouraged his men. It was a straight infantry fight now. The Yankee gunners were unsighted and so the blue-coated riflemen had to fight and kill and endure the bullets coming back. The rebel guns drenched the attackers in canister, blasting new gaps in the surviving corn. A spray of blood misted the air and somewhere a man screamed terribly until his screams were cut short by the meaty thump of a bullet burying itself in flesh. Starbuck smelled the horrid stink of burned powder, he heard the whistle of a minie bullet whip past his ear, then the rifle was back in his shoulder, and he aimed low into the corn and fired.

The gunsmoke was hanging in the still air like a layer of fog. Some men, in order to see beneath the smoke, lay down to aim. Starbuck ducked and could see Yankee legs among the corn. He fired, then backed out through the files to see how his men were faring.

The Yellowlegs were sticking to the fight. They were ramming their bullets, priming the guns, pulling their triggers, but some were falling. Some were dead. The noise was obliterating sense; it was a deafening sky of fire, a numbing rattle laced with screams. More men fell.
Starbuck
's line was thinning, but suddenly Davies's company from the Legion was pushing into their ranks to add their fire. Davies grinned at Starbuck. "Christ," he said in awe.

"Fire!" Starbuck shouted. Survival now depended simply on outfiring the enemy. "Captain Peel!" He ran toward the trees to summon the last of his shrinking battalion. "Peel! Bring your men!" Peel's company still had the old-fashioned Richmond muskets that were loaded with buck and ball and Starbuck reckoned the smoothbore volleys might work a wicked slaughter in this close-range battle. "Into line! Anywhere!" He pushed men helter-skelter into the ranks, no longer caring whether the companies kept their cohesion. "And fire! Fire! Just kill them!" He screamed the words as he emptied his revolver chamber by chamber into the shroud of smoke. "Kill them!"

Bullets whipped back from the Yankees. Stabs of flame showed where they fired, and Starbuck saw that the flame lances were getting closer as the attackers advanced, their progress fed by the rear ranks, who moved up to take the place of the dead. The rebels were backing away, not in panicked retreat, but step by step, keeping their line, firing and firing at the blue horde that slowly, inexorably, like men wading against an outflowing tide, was forcing its way to the cornfield's southern edge. It was there that they stopped, not because the rebel fire grew worse, but simply because the field's margin served as a natural boundary. Behind them was the illusory cover of what corn remained standing, while ahead of the cornfield were open pastures and rebel batteries, and the Yankee officers could not persuade their men to march into that smoky, death-swept vacancy. The rebel line had also checked, aligned now on its guns, and there the two sides stayed and traded shot for shot and death for death. The wounded hobbled back from their line, but the rebels could spare no men now to carry the injured back to the surgeons. The rebel wounded must bleed to death or else crawl on hands and knees beneath the bruising noise of the big guns.

The Georgians were bringing in reinforcements, and then Colonel Swynyard appeared behind Starbuck with the big 65th Virginia battalion. "Nate! Nate!" Swynyard was only yards away, but the noise of the battle was so great that he needed to shout. "They're firing on the graveyard!" He pointed to the East Woods, meaning that Yankees had somehow reached the trees' southern end and were threatening Swynyard's reserve of ammunition. "Find out what's happening for me!"

Swynyard feared his right flank was about to be turned, but for the moment he would hold on in the pasture where he was tumbling his battalions into the tiny space where the firefight was hottest and where he would fight his brigade as though it were one single battalion. Starbuck, running to his right, sensed that this dawn slaughter was horrendous. He could not ever remember a battle swelling into horror so fast, nor ever seeing so many wounded or dead, yet miraculously his despised battalion had stood the fire and was still standing it and still giving back as good as they got. "Well done!" he shouted at them, "well done!" No one heard him. They were deafened by the blistering noise.

He ran into the trees. A score of wounded rebels had taken shelter beneath the closest trees, and some men, even though unwounded, had joined them there, but
Starbuck
had no time to stir those laggards back to their duty. Instead he ran northward in the cover of the trunks to where he could hear his skirmishers fighting. They were very close by, evidence that the Yankees had indeed pushed them hard back. Truslow's men were among Potter's skirmishers, who in turn were mixed up with a company of Georgian skirmishers who had retreated to the trees rather than risk the canister that had been cutting the corn short, and now they all fought together. Starbuck saw Truslow reloading his rifle behind an elm tree that was scarred by bullet strikes. He dropped beside him. "What's happening?"

"Bastards ran us back," Truslow said grimly. "Reckon they've reached the road on that side of the wood." He jerked his beard eastward. He was suggesting that the rebels now only held the southwestern corner of the trees. "Sons of bitches have breech loaders," Truslow added, explaining why the Yankees had been so successful.

Breech-loading rifles were much quicker and easier to load, especially when a man was lying down or crouching behind cover, and so the Yankee skirmishers were pouring a much heavier fire than the rebels could maintain, but now the fight had stalled in the corner of the wood where thick brush, scattered stacks of cordwood, and the limestone outcrops gave the rebels enough shelter to frustrate the withering Yankee fire.

"Seen Potter?" Starbuck asked Truslow.

"Who's he?"

"Thin fellow, floppy hair."

"Over to the right," Truslow jerked his chin. "Be careful going through here. Sons of bitches are good shots." A bullet whipped a chunk of bark off the elm. "Like Gaines's Mill," Truslow said.

"That was a hellhole."

"So's this. Be careful."

Starbuck gathered himself for the dash across the wood. He could hear the heavy firing from the cornfield, but that fight seemed distant now. Instead he had entered a different version of hell, one where a man could not see his enemy, but only spot the gouts of rifle smoke that marked where the Yankee sharpshooters lurked. It was dark under the trees, a darkness caused by the remnants of fog and the thicknes
s of powder smoke. Starbuck won
dered what time it was. He reckoned the Yankees had attacked at six o'clock and somehow it felt like midday already, though he doubted if even a quarter of an hour had passed since he had first glimpsed that blue mass marching steadily toward the cornfield. "Give my love to Sally if anything happens," he said to Truslow, then he sprinted away from the elm, dodging and darting among the trees. His appearance provoked an instant fusillade from the Yankees. Bullets lashed about him, thumping into trees like ax blows, whistling in the air, flicking through leaves, then a shot seared across his back. He knew he had been hit, yet he was still running and he guessed the wound was nothing but a near miss that had laid open his skin. He saw Potter behind a stack of cord-wood and dived to join him. A Yankee jeered his plunge for safety.

"I'm almost tempted to pray," Potter said.

"Your prayers are answered," Starbuck said, "I'm here. What's happening?"

"We're holding," Potter said laconically.

"Where's Dennison?"

"Dennison? Haven't seen him."

"I sent him to reinforce you. Tumlin?"

"No sign of him," Potter said. Every few seconds the stack of wood was thumped by a Yankee bullet, and every thump would hammer a log a half inch out of alignment. "They're Pennsylvanians," Potter said. "Call themselves the Bucktails."

"How the hell do you know that?" Starbuck asked. He had rammed his rifle into a space between the logs and, without bothering to aim, fired toward the hidden skirmishers.

"We got one of them. Stupid man got too far ahead and Case pulled him down."

"Case? So Dennison's company is here?"

"Private Case is," Potter said, jerking his head west to show where Case was crouching behind a fallen tree. A dead Yankee was beside him and Case had taken the man's breech-loading rifle and was using it to fire steadily into the brush where puffs of smoke betrayed Yankee positions. "The fellow had a deer's tail pinned to the back of his hat," Potter went on. "Full of fleas, it was. He's dead now. It's difficult to live with a slit throat, it seems."